New Ways Europe

Road transport is under increasing pressure from congestion, CO2 emissions, a shortage of drivers owing to ageing, and deteriorating road safety. Yet shippers are reluctant to choose alternative modes of transport due to insufficient distribution volumes and a lack of specific know-how. This applies to both large and small shippers. In the meantime, there are really promising alternatives. New, efficient and future-proof possibilities are available if shippers combine distribution volumes, share data and knowledge, and collectively utilise all the available transport capacity. This enables shippers to make a modal shift. For example, from road to rail, short sea, or inland waterways. This creates competitive advantage: more sustainable, more reliable, more flexible and often lower transport costs.

NewWays is working hard on developing business cases focusing on matching flows, combining freight and making better use of European transport connections. Of primary importance is sustainable distribution and, for the shippers, the perfect availability of their products in the market. This will lead to new business cases for Spain and Turkey for example.

The shippers are the starting point and a selection of shippers function as front-runners. They jointly examine a common European destination, with support from NewWays. Bundling opportunities and obstacles are mapped and solutions and compromises proposed: the contours for a business case.

When a growing group of shippers agree to join a “modal shift”, this is the first step towards synchromodal transport which, depending on the volumes, service, and delivery times, determines the optimum deployment of several modalities. Achieving synchromodality requires extensive cooperation: among shippers themselves and with logistics service providers, the authorities and other market players. NewWays combines these forces, operating from North Brabant. It is a market-driven initiative, with a community of market shippers at its core, including Bolsius, FujiFilm, Greif, Lamb Weston / Meijer, Perfetti van Melle, Ricoh, Samsung, SABIC and Wuppermann.

NewWays has been adopted by BOM (Brabant Development Agency), Midpoint

Brabant, the regional development agency  REWIN, and the NHTV (Breda University of Applied Sciences).

Currently, the regional NewWays community in the Netherlands has 30 prominent shippers who are open to improvement and innovation  in order to collectively improve and renew their distribution networks. With the help of neutral parties – including the NHTV, supported by the BOM, Midpoint Brabant and REWIN development agencies – NewWays is constantly expanding its community.

Initiatives similar to NewWays elsewhere in the Netherlands and in Europe are also being set up. NewWays is actively seeking cooperation and combining clusters at home and abroad to form a strong European Network. Internationalisation is of great importance in order to identify return flows and developing roundtrips – not only to get from A to B sustainably and efficiently, but also from B to A.