Romanians who read articles from foreign magazines are familiar with the "jungle" of alliances concluded by companies present on the Internet in order to offer online services to recipients that need to strike deals between them.
The suppliers of solutions for e-commerce platforms team up with specialised virtual bourses, clearing-houses and online logistics bourses, in order to create extended B2B systems. Everybody knows what e-commerce and clearing-houses are. But what is an online logistics bourse?
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, logistics is defined as the process of planning, rolling and controlling the movement of goods, services and related information, starting with the originating point and ending with the destination, in order to meet the clients' requests."
There is more to logistics than managing the transportation services: it's about all the services needed for the commodities circuit, from order processing, raw materials receipt, the transfer of documents and goods between the departments of the same company, to the relationship with the customer, commodities packaging, waste and recalls management.
Logistics is supplied by a company's department or by outsourcing, when the company has a contract with a third-party logistics provider, a 3PL.
At an international level, there are giants such as FedEx, UPS, Deutsche Post or TPG, the fourth-party logistics providers (4PL) that resort to outsourcing on behalf of a 3PL and integrate the whole chain of deliveries thanks to the sophisticate IT networks they use in order to connect remote geographical regions.
The globalisation in the logistics industry has led to the creation of virtual bourses, developed either as 4PL portals (web sites that provide complete logistics services, including the minute administration of merchandise transport through more countries) or as "vertical" structures meeting one industry's particular needs (chemistry or metallurgy) or the "horizontal" structures of a carrier.
There are at least 83 online bourses for merchandise road transport in Europe and most of them are web sites created in Northern European countries and Germany.
As for the air transport, the largest such bourse is the famous GF-X (Global Freight Exchange), whose shareholders are Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Lufthansa, Deutsche Post, British Airways, Panalpina, SAirLogistics/Swisscargo and American Airlines Cargo.
Geo Trans (www.transport.md) from Moldavia Republic is such a virtual bourse, tailored for offers and requests of transport within Europe and Asia.
Dan Cotenescu, the director of expedition house Dacoda, considers that the lack of a Romanian logistics bourse is explained by the prejudice that "this activity does not bring earnings.
There was an attempt, a project financed by EU and drawn by the Institute of IT Research, which aimed at linking the interests of road carriers from the Balkans. The application was right, but it lacked the sense of reality, as it was not based on research in a road expedition company."
Consequently, Romanian carriers have to resort to foreign bourses when they are looking for customers and contracts.
Sebastian Nistor, the designer of the experimental web site called Romanian Logistics Bourse (www11.ewebcity.com/brl), says that the lack of such bourses in Romania has been brought about by "the poor Internet penetration al the level of transport companies, as most of them don't even have an e-mail."
Indeed, the Association of Romanian Expedition Companies (USER) has 92 registered members and less than ten have their own web site, but only two of them provide the customers with the possibility to order directly from the web site.
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