Management Summary

For the third time in a row, participants are forecasting further growth for the next five years: one third each believe that the volume of vehicles handled will increase by 10-20 % (33 %), or even by more than 20 % (34 %). At the same time, more than half of those surveyed (56 %) fear they will have to contend with capacity issues until sometime in 2025 or much longer.

“Increase of efficiency in operational processes” (71 %), “Flexible reaction to deviations from the plan” (66 %), and “Transparency about the data related to each vehicle” (49 %) are the three challenges that were most frequently rated as "very important" for the vehicle management process. For the first time, understanding and reporting CO2 emissions is also seen as essential, rated “important” (45 %) or “very important” (34 %) by the majority of respondents.

The three predominant perceptions of IT in the companies surveyed are that IT is a necessary business tool (61 %), that helps in optimizing (58 %) and automating (55 %) processes. With regard to IT, respondents consider the following benefits to be particularly important or very important in the next five years: better data analysis (95 %), increased operational efficiency (94 %), and support for strategic and tactical decisions (94 %) among many others.

The majority of companies (83%) rely on specialized software applications for vehicle logistics, self-developed, standard, or a mix of both. While some have implemented such systems eleven years ago or even further back (27%), most companies deployed them one to ten years ago (58%).

As for upcoming or recent technologies, the three that will affect businesses the most over the next five years are electric vehicles and trucks (72 % and 47 % respectively), artificial intelligence (55 %) and vehicle-based GPS telematics (44 %). In contrast to the latter trend, scanning barcodes is still the most frequently used way to track vehicles (53 %), followed by truck-based GPS telematics (35 %) as well as electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) (27 %).