Reposted from: China Transport News
China Transport News, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and G7 jointly released the White Paper on Smart Safety of Road Freight Industry in China (hereinafter referred to as the White Paper) on May 14. Drawing strength from PwC's long-term research on the transportation industry, G7's road freight Internet of Things (IoT) Big Data, and China Transport News' long-term, in-depth observations of China's road freight industry, the White Paper presents systematic insights into road freight accidents and their management status quo, underlying causes and economic implications, and then puts forward suggestions for improvement.
According to the White Paper, China's road freight industry has grown rapidly in the past decade, fueled especially by rising household spending and booming e-commerce businesses. However, the safety risk remains high while the market is expanding at a fast pace, which has become a pain point haunting the benign development of the industry. G7 Big Data shows that, as of 2019, China's road freight industry recorded an accident rate of 3.7 accidents per 1 million kilometers, revealing a still-wide gap between China and developed markets in terms of safety management.
Road freight accidents are usually subject to the combined influence of driving behaviors, equipment, external environment, unexpected incidents, etc, contributing to the complexity and diversity of the causes. However, apart from the immediate cause, it is the flawed safety management system that constitutes the long undetected systematic cause of such accidents. The White Paper holds that the absence of a refined operational system in logistics companies is the root cause of safety risks haunting China's road freight industry.
According to Steven Jiang, a partner at PwC Strategy& Automotive Consulting, in the short term, logistics companies should leverage digitalization to improve their smart safety management; in the medium and long term, they should gradually refine their operational systems to achieve effective risk management and control. Meanwhile, logistics companies should also enhance the collaboration with upstream and downstream ecosystem to jointly promote fine management and boost the efficiency of the industry.
