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Collaborative Industrial Optimization

This is the intelligent shift we can now make to redesign industrial systems for long-term sustainability and profitability. The key is to optimally utilize rail and road networks as a cohesive, multimodal logistics system for sustainable supply chains.

Where we mine, grow, and manufacture can now be thoughtfully planned to maximize efficiency and minimize negative impacts at and between each step. The current approach—simply moving more freight without considering how, where, and what we move—is short-sighted and unsustainable. How goods are moved to and from an industrial site is as important as the activities at the site itself, yet we aren’t planning and investing with this fundamental understanding in mind.

Collaborative Industrial Optimization integrates public-sector planning with private-sector commerce and capital, simultaneously benefiting industrial activity, communities, and the environment. This approach enables the creation of end-to-end industrial systems, particularly in the transportation and processing of minerals, forest materials, and solid waste into valuable products and sustainable energy sources.

The transition to Collaborative Industrial Optimization inspires us to fundamentally transform how we measure success, so that long-term sustainability is reflected in performance measures, recognition, and compensation for individuals in companies and agencies.

Key Distinctions

Collaboration has a powerful role alongside competition.

Supply chains extend across county, state, regional, and national borders. Competition narrows the fundamental framework of engagement with others. Needed improvements flow from thinking and planning in collaboration with the other entities in the supply chain.

Plan whole supply chains, not just projects.

Infrastructure investments that support supply chain systems, rather than just individual projects, deliver key benefits to the region and its businesses and investors. Progressive economic development agencies now see greater success from systemic investments that connect the components of major supply chains.

Projects of national significance are built on many projects of local significance.

The popular focus in national transportation investment on “Projects of National Significance” must be informed by the fact that there are no projects of national significance without many projects of local significance. The vision and scope of effective transportation planning and investment at every level must include as many regions, stakeholders, and projects as possible.

Including all perspectives makes infrastructure development easier, not harder.

Contrary to the prevailing belief that including all concerns and views is too complex, 360 degree inclusion of businesses, communities, and projects streamlines the productivity of infrastructure plans and investments. Transportation and supply chains are systems, best served when all parts are included in comprehensive growth and improvement plans.

Stakeholders are partners, not just survey respondents.

Stakeholder engagement is often conducted as a superficial interaction to fulfill a bureaucratic requirement. Effective infrastructure investment requires collaborative dialogue and co-creation with all stakeholder groups.

Rail and roads are one system.

Integration and coordination for maximum efficiency must guide infrastructure planning and investment. It is unproductive to pit highway, air, pipeline, and railway transport modes against each other, either in public policy or the marketplace.

Integrate freight planning with economic development.

Across the country transportation departments and economic development agencies work in silos on matters that co-influence freight development. Collaborative Industrial Optimization integrates these efforts into regional freight strategies that make transportation enhancements feasible.

Freight transportation is inseparable from land use planning.

Effective land-use planning optimizes economic development benefits while minimizing the impact of goods movement on communities and the environment. Proper use of land is as much about how goods and people move to and from a property, as what goes on at the property.

Capital is available for all well-conceived projects.

Beyond seed funding, government does not have to bear the role of primary investor in freight infrastructure as transportation providers and shippers are engaged in private-sector, income-producing enterprise that can attract private-sector funding. Infrastructure investors and lenders now holding hundreds of billions of dollars are poised to deploy capital in freight projects when presented with commercially savvy supply chain approaches.