A quarter of a century of freight exchange

The story of Timocom began early in the morning in the parking lot of a German food discounter in Düsseldorf. That week in 1997, desktop PCs were on special offer, and freight forwarder Jens Thiermann could make good use of them for his planned IT start-up. He has set himself the goal of developing a Europe-wide platform for awarding transport contracts, with which freight forwarders and carriers can find freight at short notice, reduce the number of empty kilometers and thus achieve better utilization of their vehicles.

Jens Thiermann wanted to reduce empty runs for his freight forwarding company. Together with business partners, Thiermann spent months tinkering with the software for his own freight exchange. When the time came, the founder of Timocom Soft- und Hardware GmbH was able to watch as the newly launched freight and loading space exchange Truck & Cargo filled up with offers. Then it was a matter of expanding the network of this new freight exchange and enabling logistics to digitize, because even modems were still uncharted territory at the time. "It was a feeling of absolute joy, relief and at the same time the announcement of great responsibility - even though we had no idea at the time how everything would develop," says Jens Thiermann, thinking back on it today.

Measurable benefits boost freight exchange

The freight exchange was what road freight transport in Europe had been waiting for. Wilhelm Dallmann, one of Timocom's first customers, and his forwarding company, for example, owe an 80 percent time saving at process level to Timocom's applications. After just a few years, Timocom opened locations in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in order to better serve the core markets of Eastern Europe. Today, the company has more than 50,000 customers with more than 147,000 system users in 46 European countries. They carry out 1.5 billion freight searches in the system every year.

Timocom is working on digitalizing the entire transport process. "Our vision is a world without logistical challenges," says Tim Thiermann. The founder's eldest son took over the management of the company together with Sebastian Lehnen in 2019. This means that the IT company is now managed by the second generation. The new company leaders have set themselves the goal of not only continuing the family business and the freight exchange, but also making it the largest and most secure marketplace in the freight tech sector. In the future, the topics of sustainability and CO2 savings will be on the development agenda.

The article appeared in materialfluss 6/22.