Freight reforms to cut relabelling costs

The Australian Logistics Council (ALC) has moved to introduce freight labelling guidelines based on GS1 standards.

The guidelines, gathered via the ALC Supply Chain Standards Work Group, show how to physically identify and label logistic and transport units to support efficient transport management processes.

“This announcement marks a major milestone for Australia’s Transport & Logistics industry,” GS1 Australia's industry manager Bonnie Ryan said.

“The move to introduce freight labelling guidelines based on GS1 standards is foundational for the industry to achieve optimal interoperability and visibility across the supply chain.”

The guidelines include the information required by transport operators and label formats that have been designed to enable integrated tracking of freight across multiple transport carriers, reduce relabelling and duplication, and transportation chain costs.

“With ALC research showing a one per cent improvement in supply chain efficiency would boost GDP by $2 billion, the Australian Transport Label Guideline certainly has the potential to help us achieve this goal,” ALC MD Michael Kilgariff said.

The Australian Transport Industry Label Guideline will include a roadmap for Australian transport companies to move from current manual processes where they still exist to full automation, such as scanning, electronic transport instructions and transport status notifications via EDI between buyers and sellers of transport and logistic services.

The standard identification of transport items of any composition, whether a single carton, a pallet containing many cartons, or a bundle of steel, will reduce waste and cost of re-labelling freight as it travels across a multi-leg supply chain journey while providing a common tracking identifier to support end-to-end visibility.