Bosch and AWS enter into collaboration to digitalise logistics

Bosch and USA-based cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) have teamed-up to improve efficiency and sustainability in the transportation and logistics industry.

Their plan is to offer logistics companies and freight forwarders across the globe quick and easy access to digital services through a platform powered by AWS. Going forward, they will offer support for topics ranging from capacity utilisation of commercial vehicle fleets to monitoring goods flows to order processing – all from a single source. To this end, Bosch and AWS have now entered a strategic collaboration.

Bosch will be responsible for developing and operating the logistics platform, the core of which is a marketplace for digital services, while AWS will contribute its comprehensive cloud offering and expertise. The platform will facilitate smooth interaction between a variety of services and data, enabling transportation and logistics companies to benefit much more from the opportunities of digitalisation without having to set up their own resource- and cost-intensive IT projects. The marketplace will also be open to all digital logistics services providers. Industry and consumers will benefit from the initiative because of greater reliability and transparency in goods and parcel delivery, for example. The companies plan to launch in Europe, India and the USA set in late 2022.

“The transportation and logistics industry is the backbone of the global economy,” commented Sandeep Nelamangala, Executive Director, Bosch Limited, and Executive Sponsor of logistics platform business at Bosch. “In the years ahead, it will have to shoulder continuously increasing transport volumes for goods and commodities while simultaneously reducing its carbon footprint. In collaboration with AWS, we want to help the logistics industry with this. We aim to ring in the future of the industry and drive forward its digitalisation.”

“Developing hyperconnected transportation functions is one of the most complex technical challenges of our time,” said Kathrin Renz, Vice President, Business Development and Industries, AWS. “The digital marketplace will enable logistics customers to quickly transform their business into a fully digital end-to-end value chain. Customers will benefit from the tools, frameworks, and modules we offer for digitalisation, in addition to improving the sustainability of their transportation processes.”

With its logistics platform, Bosch aims to provide a key solution for many of the challenges facing the transportation and logistics industry. The advantage of this platform is that it will create an entire ecosystem and a software environment in which freight carriers and forwarders can select, book, and execute different providers’ services to meet their specific needs. The platform also allows for easy integration of applications that are already relevant to the market, for instance, in transportation management systems. Thanks to shared usage of data that is available through the telematics systems in commercial vehicles, for example from fleet management, it is also possible to link and allow interplay between different services from different areas. This makes it easier to leverage synergies.