Data fuelling Scania's future business

Abstract

Scania is a Swedish manufacturer of trucks, busses and marine engines. With more than a hundred years of manufacturing experience Scania has built a track record of highly reliable and energy efficient trucks. Over the years Scania has been expanding its offering with maintenance services and later with data driven services to assist their clients in their daily operations. This thesis proposes an innovation strategy and service proposition for building on these data driven services.

The transport system is currently undergoing a transformation, led by trends like electrification, digitalization and connectivity. These trends have effects on how the value network of transport and logistics is organised and offer space for new business models. For Scania this means that there are opportunities to rethink favourable positioning in the value chain and develop business models, related to data driven services. To explore these potential new business models and positioning, this thesis aims to create a strategy, captured in a roadmap, supported by a new service proposition captured in a use case.

To create an according strategy and service proposition the internal environment and customers, value network, consumer context, market trends, technologies were analysed. These aspects formed the foundation for defining a strategic direction and future vision on data driven services. With this project the decision was made to narrow down to one specific application of transport to be able to provide more focus and in depth contextualisation. The chosen application was cooled transport for grocers, due to the perishable nature goods and transformation towards e-commerce. The future vision that was developed based on the insight gathered is: “Providing carefree cooled logistics.”

With this future vision a new service concept was developed that supports grocers in operating their logistics operations carefree by enhancing trust, increasing transparency and operational efficiency. This is accomplished by a combination of load sharing and secured data sharing, in which blockchain technology plays a key role. The concept was captured in a service blueprint and further illustrated in a use case.

Finally the concept has been captured in a roadmap, to build a pathway towards reaching the designated vision of providing carefree cooled logistics. Although the service concept and roadmap are targeted at cooled transport for grocers, some needs and principles are transferable to other applications of transport, creating potential opportunities for service development in other applications of transport.