Nicholas Minde
SVP Overland Germany
Nicholas Minde
SVP Overland Germany, Kuehne + Nagel
An industrial designer and mechanical engineer turned forwarder with many years of senior management experience in the logistics and supply chain industry. His focus areas include operations and lean management, cross-cultural teams, general management, and organizational design. Nicholas is currently running the road forwarding business of Kuehne + Nagel in Germany.
Vincent Beaufils
Director / CDO
Vincent Beaufils
Director / CDO, LKW Walter
Vincent Beaufils is Chief Digital Officer at LKW WALTER Internationale Transportorganisation AG in Wiener Neudorf, Austria. He has worked there in different positions for 23 years. He is now responsible for the digitalization projects with a focus on new possibilities offered by big data and machine learning. Developing event based transport visibility systems is his current field of action.
Jonah McIntire
Founder & Managing Director
Jonah McIntire
Founder & Managing Director , TNX Logistics
Jonah McIntire is a supply chain expert with broad international experience, having lived and worked in 12 countries over his career. Those experiences center on the confluence of technology and supply chain management in the retail, life sciences, and FMCG sectors. Jonah's career includes running global logistics for a US retailer, launching business units for Manhattan Associates and Panalpina, founding Clear Abacus, a transport optimisation software business acquired by GT Nexus in 2013, and authoring a university textbook on supply chain visibility. Since 2016 he is a founder and managing director of TNX Logistics, a company offering AI for Trucking.
Rod Franklin
Adjunct Professor of Logistics
Rod Franklin
Adjunct Professor of Logistics, Kühne Logistics University
During the first presentation, Prof. Rod Franklin explained what Physical Internet is and how it could work by connecting the networks of logistics companies into one global network for transporting goods across the globe. He compared it to the regular Internet, which is based on two fundamental concepts: standardized packets and a set of connections between various internets, which are handled by routers and hubs that operate the standard protocols. To make the Physical Internet a reality, one fundamental element companies have to do is figure out how to build a standardized box or a series of standardized boxes. That could transform the land-based transport the way containers transformed the maritime industry. Then it would be possible to develop the material-handling equipment and the processes to rapidly handle the switch between various carriers or modes. At the end of his presentation, Prof. Franklin also added that we are still missing the visionaries, which need to come from the logistics industry and not from academia.
Joao Monteiro
Founder/Managing Director
Joao Monteiro
Founder/Managing Director, LogIndex
In the third keynote presentation, Mr. João Monteiro described the LogIndex initiative – a service by Kuehne+Nagel, which predicts economic indicators based on flows of logistics to show how the economy is developing. The service is targeted primarily at financial institutions and is distributed via an online platform. Its customers can see macro-sector estimates up to 60 days in advance updated in real-time. Mr. Monteiro demonstrated the live version of the service and explained that the Global K+N Indicators (gKNi) contain massive amounts of Kuehne+Nagel data as well as the information from 50 different logistics- or trade-driven sources. He explained that K+N is trying to find the most advanced uses of data and how to take advantage of Big Data in the unique position of Logistics, so the Logindex business unit was set up almost like a playground to develop new skills and technologies, which will later be able to contribute to K+N operations of tomorrow.
Sven Verstrepen
Head of Supply Network Innovation & Analytics
Sven Verstrepen
Head of Supply Network Innovation & Analytics, Ahlers
During the second part of the presentation, Mr. Sven Verstrepen demonstrated several concrete examples of how machine learning and Artificial Intelligence are currently being used in logistics and supply chain industries. He described three use cases by IBM Watson Supply Chain, ASNIA (Ahlers Supply Network Innovation & Analytics) which is dealing with horizontal collaboration and sharing capacity between different players in the logistics market, and a Transmetrics case about logistics data cleansing, forecasting of future shipping volumes and predictive network optimization. Mr. Verstrepen pointed out that one of the key challenges for machine learning in logistics is handling dirty data of low quality, and that Transmetrics has been able to solve data cleansing and enrichment for logistics companies with very impressive results.
Paulo Rodrigues
CEO Lisbon Office
Paulo Rodrigues
CEO Lisbon Office, IntellectEU
The last presentation focused on the blockchain technology and how it can be used in the supply chain. Mr. Paulo Rodrigues briefly explained how the blockchain developed in the last few years, how it eliminates the need for the 3rd trusted party and mentioned some of the other differentiating factors that blockchain brings to the market, such as privacy, consensus mechanism, programmable rules (smart contracts), increased resiliency – no single point of failure, and others. However, Mr. Rodrigues stressed on the fact that the blockchain technology is still in its very beginning. We can see news around various PoC projects, but the platforms are not yet robust. People are just starting to build applications that can address real issues, including the issues in the supply chain. Among examples, Mr. Rodrigues mentioned the cooperation between IBM and Maersk, as well as a use case for invoice discounting, where blockchain technology helped to eliminate challenges such as reconciliation issues, data synchronization, lack of visibility, fraud, and others.
Frank Salliau
Founder/Data Scientist
Frank Salliau
Founder/Data Scientist, Mentat-IT
The next presentation was separated into two parts. First, Mr. Frank Salliau briefly explained the concept of machine learning, which is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. He showed the real-life examples of how machine learning is used in the cases which seemed to be science-fiction just ten years ago, including such technologies as autonomous killer drones, or plane engines. Mr. Salliau also explained that machine learning and Artificial Intelligence are becoming more and more popular due to the rise of Big Data, scalable computer processing power, and the availability of programming languages to handle machine learning algorithms.