“We can do much more for our customers than just provide blue pooling pallets”
16 March, Mechelen – CHEP offers sustainable supply chain solutions worldwide, based on pallet pooling. As the market leader in pallet pooling, CHEP has built up an enormous network of customers and transporters worldwide. This gives CHEP a good insight into the goods flows of all its customers. Using these insights, data, and its own developed tools, CHEP looks for synergies between transport flows and suggests optimizations. Through transport collaboration with and between customers, many kilometers, costs and CO2 can be saved. This service fits in with CHEP’s ambition to make the supply chain more sustainable and efficient worldwide.
Today, more than 200 international companies are involved in CHEP’s transport cooperation program. CHEP Spain plays a pioneering role in this. Recently, CHEP initiated a collaboration between FMCG producer Henkel and dairy company CAPSA FOOD. Both companies now share a duotrailer three times a week (a truck pulling two standard trailers) on a joint route from Madrid to Catalonia. As a result, they save up to 250 000 empty kilometers or 115 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
“Transport collaborations require time and trust, but in the end, it prevents empty kilometers on the road.”
Setting up sustainable and more efficient transport partnerships is also a priority for CHEP Benelux. Bram Lefever, Collaborative Transport Solutions Manager at CHEP Benelux, analyses customers’ chains, looks for similarities and suggests improvements. “For example, we see that our customers today often return from the UK with empty trucks. While CHEP itself very often needs pallets from the UK. We started talking to those customers and are checking how to fill their empty trucks with CHEP pallets. A win-win for both parties,” says Lefever.
CHEP Benelux is ready to go a step further and, just like in Spain, also initiate transport collaborations between customers and facilitate them as a neutral third party. Of course, there must be a match in many areas between the two companies: think of time slots, volumes, truck types… “Everything must be right. This requires time and above all trust, but in the end, it prevents empty kilometers on the road. With this service, CHEP reinforces its pioneering role in a sustainable supply chain. We do much more than pallet pooling”, says Lefever.