Railway freight has been transitioning from a traditional transportation production enterprise to a modern transportation logistics enterprise, and through the integration and integration of transportation, warehousing, loading and unloading, distribution, packaging, processing, information, and finance businesses, it carries out full category logistics, full process services, comprehensive operation, and full process management. At present, this transformation has achieved phased results.

At the same time, in the era of global economic transformation where the industrial revolution has shifted to the information revolution and industrial civilization has shifted to the network civilization, traditional logistics enterprises are also facing the challenges brought by the new economy.

Nowadays, the market value of Amazon Group has exceeded $540 billion, and its logistics sector has posed unprecedented challenges to traditional freight giants such as UPS, FedEx, and DHL; JD Logistics has 335 large warehouses in seven major logistics centers, with a cumulative storage area of 7.1 million square meters, covering 2691 counties and districts, and is far ahead of warehousing enterprises in terms of scale; Cainiao Network is taking an unusual path, using the method of gathering consumers, merchants, logistics companies, and third-party data resources to form a smart logistics/business flow supply chain to occupy the profit peak.

The application of technologies such as the Internet, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has enabled the consumer market of the demand side to shift towards personalization, instantization, convenience, and proactive upgrading; On the other hand, it allows the supply side to highlight its core advantages and form a traditional supply chain model of upstream and downstream division of labor cooperation, starting to integrate and develop into a smart supply chain model across borders.

Due to the direct connection between demand and supply, with the rapid growth of diversified, highly efficient, small batch, multi frequency, and one-stop "door to door" freight demand, the ability to transform into the supply chain and achieve supply chain innovation and development has become one of the core competitive advantages in the logistics industry.

On the one hand, China has rapidly entered a new economic stage with consumption as the primary driving force; On the other hand, developed countries around the world have successively made supply chain a national strategy, and China has timely upgraded supply chain innovation and application to a national strategy to accelerate industrial integration, deepen social division of labor, improve integrated innovation capabilities, and promote supply side structural reform.

As a major artery of the national economy and an important infrastructure of the country, railways have advantages such as networking, standardization, scale, all-weather, and green safety. The operating mileage exceeds 124000 kilometers, and the passenger and freight lines reach 100000 kilometers, making them the transportation enterprise with the most comprehensive network coverage and scale advantages. However, railways have also shown various institutional and institutional incompatibilities in the fierce competition in the logistics market, especially in the competition with road freight, where they have been at a disadvantage for a long time.

From this perspective, in a market environment that absolutely ensures production safety, without major actions, railways may not have the opportunity to revitalize their momentum. However, new technologies such as the Internet, big data, and cloud computing may support railway freight transportation, relying on their own resource advantages, to collaborate with upstream and downstream enterprises to form a new business model, achieve overtaking on curves, and create a railway supply chain suitable for the new stage of the economy.

The supply chain emphasizes a 'comprehensive customer-centric approach'. Many non railway enterprises are accustomed to utilizing railway freight resources to achieve full supply chain services. Railway freight has long played the role of a carrier in this supply chain, and can only attract customers with low freight rates, which is far from real customers; After the construction of the 95306 freight network platform, the role of a transaction intermediary was simply added, attempting to promote the "door-to-door" full supply chain service. However, its ability to utilize other logistics channels was severely insufficient, making it difficult to smoothly share road, water, and air transportation resources, and to solve the problem of low quality and efficiency in connecting with transportation interfaces such as road, water, and air, resulting in slow improvement of market competitiveness.

Although railway freight has gained a large amount of transportation capacity released by high-speed rail network operation, when demand is high, the transportation capacity is still seriously insufficient. At the same time, railways also lack the awareness and ability to coordinate road transportation resources or directly utilize road transportation resources, thus failing to meet customer needs at all times and losing high-quality customers and markets that could have been maintained.

Although railway freight has accumulated a massive amount of transportation data, the opening and operation of the 95306 website has accelerated the accumulation of data. However, the involvement of various freight forwarders makes it difficult for railways to grasp the entire supply chain data from the original cargo owner to the final consumption, making it difficult to turn massive data into data assets that support supply chain revenue, and even more difficult to achieve supply chain "scenario realization" supported by big data.

Although railway freight has a national railway network with scale and competitive advantages, and has established a complete logistics terminal from receiving, loading and unloading to distribution, it cannot truly motivate grassroots employees in the settlement and distribution of freight, and it is even more difficult for express companies such as SF Express and "Three Links and One Delivery" to obtain the labor dividend of "express delivery boys" through a single ticket billing system, which is highly prone to the occurrence of peripheral power rent-seeking The behavior of grassroots individuals seeking personal gain through their positions leads to customer churn.

The controllability, quantification, and monetization of data are necessary conditions for transforming data resources into data assets; On the basis of big data, with core business processes as the link, cross-border cooperation with external data can achieve data value-added; Then, through authorized data sharing within or between enterprises, 'scenario realization' can be achieved.

Railway freight transportation with big data advantages is fully capable of building data assets through the promotion of container multimodal transportation, and then building a railway supply chain based on the multimodal transportation operation mode to achieve data integration and cross-border integration for upstream and downstream enterprises, and complete the "scenario realization" of big data.

At present, the proportion of multimodal transportation in China's total freight volume is only 2.9%, far lower than 40% in the United States and 35% in Europe; The intermodal transportation between sea and rail is only 1.5%, which is far lower than the 49.5% in the United States. It can be seen that multimodal transportation will bring great room for improvement to the logistics industry's "cost reduction and efficiency increase".

Improving the proportion of multimodal transportation is the responsibility of the entire logistics industry in society. However, road freight has not shown more willingness towards container and multimodal transportation, as container multimodal transportation not only breaks the high profits brought by traditional trucks due to overloading and non tax "black economy", but also requires specialized equipment and increased loading rates for professionals; Sea/water transportation, on the other hand, has long been guided by the market to achieve open sea/water intermodal transportation, and there are not many expectations for rail sea multimodal transportation with a monopoly consciousness. Therefore, only railway freight is the most willing and likely to promote container multimodal transportation.

Looking forward to the railway supply chain based on multimodal transportation becoming the most beautiful landscape for reducing costs and increasing efficiency in the logistics industry under the new economy.

Author: Liu Dacheng, Vice President of the Internet Industry Research Institute and Director of the Logistics Industry Research Center at Tsinghua University, Doctoral Supervisor of the Department of Industrial Engineering, Executive Vice Chairman of the Railway Journal, Executive Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Expert Committee of the Dangerous Goods Professional Committee of the China Transportation Association, and Chairman of the Digital Agriculture Committee of the China Association of Agricultural Products Circulation Brokers, Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Smart Supply Chain Special Committee of the Beijing Alliance for Integrated Services of Two Modernizations, and Chief Expert of the Logistics Weekly of Xinhua Economic Reference News Agency.