The role of urban consolidation centers and microhubs for sustainable logistics. To understand the role of each of these physical urban logistics infrastructures and their complementarity, it is first necessary to define their concepts.
An Urban Consolidation Center (UCC) is a logistics facility for the consolidation of urban flows of goods, shared by several companies, with the aim of reducing goods traffic.
A Microhub is a logistics facility in which goods are consolidated within the city to cover a small area, however, since it does not have much space, not only for storage but also for product supply, its stock is aligned with the demand for a limited number. space and whose main objective is to enable the use of low-emission vehicles or innovative means of transport for last-mile delivery.
We know that cities were designed for trade and people’s lives, but not for logistics, this is the key point from which we must start looking for solutions that allow logistics to be adapted to cities and not cities to logistics without these having a negative impact on people’s lives, it is important for this to design a logistics network based on a corporate culture focused on sustainability.
This is where a lot of mistakes happen, because many companies spare no expense when it comes to seeking cutting-edge technology, but they forget that for an urban distribution of goods, the jewel in the crown is the design of a physical logistics infrastructure.
Adapted to each city and its cultures which allows us to store and distribute products in an urban area with the least impact on cities and when I talk about the impact on cities and the lives of their inhabitants, it must take into account that this can be sound, visual, environmental and/or the collapse of its urban road infrastructure.
According to last consulting studies, it has been established that there are more and more people living in the metropolitan areas of the countries: 76% of the world’s population lives in urban areas and one in eight people lives in a city of more than one million inhabitants. inhabitants. , which leads us to face great challenges to carry out a sustainable urban distribution.
Therefore, we must work on the development of urban distribution centers to get closer to the consumer, so that it gives us the possibility of applying collaborative logistics and having a better level of service, also achieving sustainable operation, improving our image in the mind of the consumer and achieving a great differential with respect to the competition, also allowing us to increase our productivity, reducing stocks in the various CDs or microhubs and centralizing the assembly of boxes in the warehouses.
One of the factors that limits the growth of e-commerce in many countries is the absence of a strategy for designing a physical logistics infrastructure based on the complexity of its cities and the habits of the people who live there.
