A European FEderated Network of
Information eXchange in Logistics
(FENIX)
FENIX was a 4 year long Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) project aiming to support the development, validation, and deployment of the digital information systems along the EU transport Core Network.
Objectives
FENIX aimed to develop the first European federated architecture for data sharing serving the European logistics community of shippers, logistics service providers, mobility infrastructure providers, cities, and authorities in order to offer interoperability between any individual existing and future platforms.
Role of justASK!
justASK! was sub-contracted by the European Shippers' Council (ESC) and contributed to two major activities within FENIX.
Activity 4: Pilot Site roll out
Eleven Pilot Sites (PSs) have been established within FENIX, each of them developing so-called Use Cases (UC) in which the use of existing and further developed or newly employed federated networks will be demonstrated. justASK! was active within one of these Pilot Sites, namely the Dutch Pilot Site or ‘SMIP’. ‘SMIP’ stands for 'Smart door-to-door multimodal T&L services across Ten-T corridors'.
Activity 5: Evaluation
ESC was leader of Sub-Activity 5.4 (Experience and impact assessment). The key objective of this activity was to quantify the impact assessment of the use of federated platforms across the various Use Cases of all Pilot Sites. justASK! performed this evaluation of the Pilot Sites which plays an important role in the 'learning by doing approach' to prepare the next phase for deployment of Logistics & Transport corridor information services across TEN-T corridors based on the federative architecture of platforms of networks.
The difficulty of assessing the impact lied within the quantification and comparing the so-called baseline (present 'As-Is' situation) to the ‘after implementation’ state ('To-Be' situation) when the federated platforms had been implemented. To be able to do so, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in essential categories had been defined and were ‘measured’ during 'As-Is' and 'To-Be' situations.
Furthermore, an overall assessment framework has been drafted to find a common methodology to assess and quantify the impact of the use of federated platforms under different regional, geographical, legal, and technical constraints.
Different tools were used to evaluate the FENIX implementation, e.g. cost-benefit analysis or multi-criteria-analysis. The underlying difficulty was to find the right overall indicator to assess the impact considering the technical issues, differences in Use Cases, different stakeholder views, different technical solutions, etc.
Further information
For more information, please visit the FENIX website.
What can justASK! do for you?
justASK! has experience in the evaluation of impact assessments. Whenever a new method or tool is implemented, we can develop a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) which we use for an assessment of how successfully the implementation of the tool was performed. The difficulty in most cases is that KPIs very often contradict each other (.e.g. price and quality) and have to be weighted according to the preferences of one or several end-users. justASK! has successfully used Multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) tools for this in the past.
justASK! will perform a stepwise approach in performing evaluation assessments. It will first develop a list of KPIs together with our clients and then identify the potential end-users / stakeholders using the developed methodology or tool. Together with the end-users, different evaluation approaches will be established according to the different preferences of the end-users (e.g. by questionnaires or end-user workshops). Finally, we will perform the analysis and discuss the results with the end-users and our clients. Interested? JUST ASK!