Cost pressure, optimization and digitalization are presenting companies and freight forwarders with ever greater challenges these days. If you want to be competitive on the market, you have to act. This means automating processes, reducing costs and at the same time acquiring more customers and generating leads.

There are still many digital construction sites in logistics in particular. Up to 5 percent of trucks arriving at loading and unloading points are rejected because the transport was not planned correctly due to a lack of information or because the location- or product-specific requirements were not met. All logistics partners are directly affected by this: Shippers, logistics service providers and goods recipients. Despite the digital revolution that has taken place in transport logistics over the last 10 years, telephone, email, fax and Excel are still the order of the day.

Largely unaffected by digital initiatives, a fundamental problem also persists: relevant information for loading and unloading is not reliably available and restricts delivery and planning reliability. Shippers and freight forwarders still keep track of this information individually and in unstructured form and different formats. This not only causes enormous effort for all parties involved in data storage and data reconciliation, but also inevitably leads to errors and misunderstandings, which in turn manifest themselves in truck rejections, unnecessary waiting times, lost loading slots and extra kilometers.

A reference source for all logistics partners

This is exactly where Loady comes in. Developed together with logistics experts from various industries, the new standard platform for loading requirements brings clarity. This benefits the entire transport sector, from freight purchasing to freight orders, transport planning and scheduling, right through to the actual delivery. The principle of Loady is simple: companies keep their location and product-related loading requirements up to date in Loady in a structured form and then share the data with their business or logistics partners. In this way, misunderstandings do not arise in the first place: From now on, all parties refer to a uniform source that is recognized by all.

For user-friendly handling, Loady data can be used directly in internal company applications and processes via an API interface. Loady is available in German, English, Polish and Spanish, with further European languages planned. With Loady2Go, a special driver view, truck drivers can also access all relevant information online and offline.

Loady is a venture of Chemovator, BASF's business incubator. The idea for an industry-wide platform for loading requirements was born in 2021 during an exchange with logistics experts. It became clear how strongly transport logistics is characterized by manual processes and what inefficiencies result from this. Stefanie Kraus and Elzbieta Wiankowska - both founders of Loady and still employees at BASF at the time - noticed that although digitalization is progressing, the reliable master data required for this is still being handled as it was 25 years ago. "An absolute absurdity in this day and age", the two are convinced - and successfully pitched their idea to the company's internal incubator. Development starts in December 2021, and the third co-founder, Dennis Jantos, joins the founding team six months later. Loady goes live in 2022. Since the start of the pilot phase, the first industrial companies such as BASF and Evonik have recorded more than 20 European locations, 40 loading and unloading points and 150 products. Since then, the venture has been growing continuously. The spin-off of Loady is planned for September 2023.