LOGISTICS Management 34

Cycling enthusiasts among you will undoubtedly agree with me: 95 percent of a stage can easily be summarised as a bunch of tinkering in the margins. Everything is decided on the final straight. That scenario also applies to logistics, where – just like in yet another sleepy edition of Milan-San Remo – the real top riders only get out of the saddle when the peloton sees the red rag fluttering and Renaat Schotte has shouted 'Ultimo Kilometro!' through the microphone. I am of course talking about the last-mile specialists, who manage to deliver goods to our increasingly busy city centres through clever stream bundling. Exactly on time, and also deadly efficient. Think of Mark Cavendish's ultimate jump... but then on a cargo bike. Further on in this magazine you can read all about last-mile logistics, a discipline in which we Belgians – and I'm talking about CityDepot and Bubble Post rather than Tornado Tom – lead the peloton. Back to the fuss now, because while the last mile continues to be a frequent topic of conversation among shippers, in the transport sector, for a few months now, all that has been talked about is kilometers. Incidentally, we saw that fuss coming from… miles away, because if the Belgian carriers have to swallow the kilometer charge on April 1, 2016 without any flanking measures, the ultimo kilometro could be very close for quite a few carriers.