The Schiphol Cargo community’s Milk Run initiative has reduced C02 emissions at the airport by 30% and truck movements in its first year.
Thierry Huizing, of Air Cargo Netherlands: “the Milk Run is the result of a partnership between Air Cargo Netherlands (ACN) and two graduate students who were on their work placements with us. They were tasked with reporting on how ACN could tackle increasing emission levels, and identified the need to decrease traffic between the Ground Handlers (GHAs) and the forwarders. We realised we needed to be more collaborative in order to decrease truck movements and GHA waiting times and cut CO2 emissions from the engines of trucks waiting in line.
We started with five members – Menzies, a GHA, Bos Logistics, a trucker, and three forwarders, Panalpina, DHL and Nippon Express, all major players.
Our newest member is CEVA Logistics who joined in March this year.
Handlers have seen the advantages of the Milk Run because it means they are able to push freight directly on to the forwarders. This has a fantastic knock on-effect on their warehouse operations, and affords them a lot of extra available space.
Our forwarder members benefit from cost savings because of reduced waiting times at the warehouse. Drivers and vans waiting in line are stationary but that unproductive time still has to be paid for. The Milk Run reduces those driving costs because delivery to the airport can come at a fixed rate.
Nippon Express, who is participating in our new export trial, recently reported that their administrative and staffing burden has been hugely reduced now they no longer send their trucks to the ground handler.
Other forwarders have been able to cut out the planning and scheduling for their trucks at Schiphol completely – they need only select the freight, and sit back confident in the knowledge that it will be collected from the warehouse.
Swissport has reported seeing improvement on their waiting times which they have been trying to address for some time. I am thrilled the Milk Run is providing Schiphol Cargo Community members with solutions!
A surprising development has been that trucking companies are now working with ground handlers who are not their clients, and we feel great that we have created a model for how true collaboration can contribute toward common goals.
The whole Milk Run project team are really encouraged by these results and are looking forward to an exciting year of developments in further decreasing costs and CO2, and increasing efficiency across the whole cargo community!
For more information on the Milk Run, contact Thierry on thierry.huizing@acn.nl or +31 (0) 20 316 39 40.