Digitalisation helps Jongeneel Transport move forward

In recent years, Jongeneel Transport has invested heavily in digitisation, (personal) development of staff and sustainable business practices. Meanwhile, this is bearing fruit and the company distinguishes itself as a professional and modern player in the market. Chief executive officer Ruud Jongeneel on the digital transformation that enables this.

Family-owned Jongeneel Transport is a modern and professional transporter of gases in bulk and bottles. The transporter was founded in 1956 and its management is now in the hands of the third generation. Jongeneel Transport has its own modern fleet of 170 tractor units, 150 towed units and ten transportable forklift trucks. The company employs 185 of its own drivers and 30 regular charters. At the Valkenburg and Europoort branches, 35 office staff work, all of whom have access to the current customised applications for managing fleet data, workshop planning, rate agreements, transport planning, invoicing, inspection assignments for the drivers and time registration by the workshop.

Digitalisation has been a spearhead of Jongeneel Transport for years, and partly thanks to the custom-made application Assets, developed in-house, the company is growing fast. "We have been developing this application since 2008," explains chief executive officer Ruud Jongeneel, "the functionality is very extensive. Yet the time has come to replace this application in phases with a thorough and complete standard application. While Assets is complete, certain process innovations do not fit and our software developer is no longer 25."

For Jongeneel Transport, maintaining long-term relationships with employees, customers and suppliers is important. "That is incredibly valuable," says Ruud Jongeneel. "At the same time, it is understandable that this makes our business processes quite customer- and colleague-specific. We are going to harmonise this: we absolutely don't want to run the risk of implementing the same business processes in a new transport management system (TMS). You see this a lot, but then buying a new and expensive package doesn't bring you much. We also want to make great strides in terms of cooperation with our customer in areas such as tariff structures and information exchange. That is why we felt it was very important not to just brush off this thinking. We want to enjoy this strategic process and IT renewal for many years to come." 

Consultancy firm IT's Teamwork was called in for this strategic renewal. Jongeneel's controller Jan van der Nagel invited all office employees to complete the BusinessITScan^®. Through the automatically generated dashboard and advisory report, the transporter got a sharp integral picture of how it was doing in terms of operations and IT. "The improvement suggestions that all employees entered were also directly included in the advisory report," says IT's Teamwork director Anton Dijkhuis. "That already gave Jongeneel a lot of insight and increased commitment. We discussed the result openly and honestly with the teams. That is also the idea behind the BusinessITScan^®; involving employees properly in the changes."

Based on the existing situation and the improvement proposals that had been put forward, a project was set up. A total of ten project steps were defined and completed in phases, with the BusinessITScan^® being the first step and thus the kick-off of the project. Under the motto "first organise, then automate", Jongeneel started the extensive project in October 2022. Meanwhile, this part of the digitisation project is coming to an end and the stakeholders have reached the final and tenth point in the project planning: the selection of a new TMS supplier.

In its thinking, Jongeneel Transport also took into account its own corporate philosophy 'People/Planet/Power'. "With our team of committed employees and our living environment, we want to act responsibly" said Ruud Jongeneel. "Working honestly and respectfully and being a powerful, reliable service provider. We draw strength and energy from this to fulfil our promises every day. This suits our family business and all the quality and safety standards we meet with our ADR transport. We have challenged ourselves in our thinking: how can we work even more sustainably and efficiently with further digitalisation and more data-driven operations?"

As a second step, Jongeneel Transport wanted to gain insight into what exactly it all had within the company in terms of IT. "With our software developer and ict specialist Reinder Stolte, we clearly drew and described the current it-landscape with all applications and links," says Jan van der Nagel. It automatically led to the third phase of the project: the bpm workshop. Anton Dijkhuis: "We drew the business process model on a large whiteboard with the managers and process experts from Transport, Controlling, Technology, QHSSE, P&O and IT, among others. This gave us a good overview of the processes, the cooperation between the teams and the process owners. We also discussed the ideas that colleagues entered in the BusinessITScan and those that arose during the workshop. We immediately saw that those ideas should coherently lead to clear starting points."

Then all the business processes in the bpm and task overview were worked out with each other, and Jongeneel got all the peculiarities and exceptions on the radar. "This gave us the opportunity to reflect with each other: is it really logical that we work this way or have they become habits and can we organise more simply and intelligently?" says Ruud Jongeneel. "And that was possible, because various tasks have thus returned to the logical departments, and we enter data earlier in the current applications. So that's already the first gain, without having to buy any other software at all."

Together with the core team, Jongeneel Transport translated the starting points into a clear motto, which allowed priorities to be set: 'From turbulent growth to profitable stability'. "This makes clear what we want and it helps to set priorities and redesign our organisation step-by-step," says Ruud Jongeneel. "This gave us a good foundation to work out the replacement scenarios and describe the requirements and wishes. We divided these into five categories, namely functionality, architecture, supplier, costs and knowledge. In this way, we had a real focus on what changes we want to implement in the organisation and what we expect from a new TMS. And that's quite a lot. Buying a new TMS is different from buying a new jumper."

Jongeneel provided the scenarios, requirements and wishes to some 20 logistics software vendors and invited them to complete a response form. "That sounds like a lot, but you have to remember that Assets is now used for vehicle management, workshop, planning, invoicing and inspections," says controller Van der Nagel. "We want to manage the expectation towards the software suppliers as well: we expect quite a lot from them." With their responses, the family business was able to draw up a list of strong and suitable parties. "A select number of them we have invited to give demonstrations to our core team with our process scenarios. Currently, we are finalising this and are close to our decision. It is very interesting to see how those demos lead to very good, internal conversations and further sharpen our principles."

Meanwhile, the world is not standing still, especially in transport, and new challenges from customers are being taken up. Ruud Jongeneel: "Take developments like BRZO and NIS2, we can and must now also give them a place in our package selection." Summing up, the transport company's CEO concludes that the almost completed ten steps were very valuable. In his opinion, the joint thinking, the formation of the team and sufficient time freed up are also some success factors of the NOTIME project: New Maintenance Transport Incident Modular Simple.

"It is great to see that we are now much better with the core team and the other colleagues involved 'looking over the fences' and working more closely together. Each thinks well of our new processes and new application requirements. This gives a lot of confidence in the next phase: a good package implementation and better information exchange in the chain. Of course, this will be quite a job, but we are very confident that together we can prepare Jongeneel Transport for the next ten to fifteen years."