The Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Adif (Spain's railway infrastructure manager), and State Ports have taken another step in the digitalization of the Spanish logistics sector, renewing their commitment to the SIMPLE technology platform. Specifically, they have optimized this platform by integrating new functionalities and strengthening comprehensive system support, which will allow them to offer higher quality service to users and improve the user experience for both private operators and the public administration.
SIMPLE (Simplification of Processes for a Logistic Enhancement) is a digital platform designed to promote the integrated and digital management of documents, data, and information flows related to multimodal freight transport across the various nodes and modes of the transport chain. It brings together all the information from the logistics chain, ensuring interoperability, efficiency, security, and accessibility among its stakeholders.
Extension of SIMPLE
To improve the platform launched in 2023, we were recently awarded a contract worth €1.7 million with a 12-month term. The new contract aims to offer higher quality service and boost commercial activity and the number of platform users.
It will also provide comprehensive support, ensuring maximum application availability at all times, reducing response times, and guaranteeing system continuity for the efficient management of your logistics processes. Support will be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Towards a smarter and more efficient model
With the introduction of new features, SIMPLE will become the central hub for the digital management of transport documentation in Spain. This will move towards a smarter model, capable of integrating data from different sources (port, rail, airport, road traffic systems, and IoT networks) to enhance the traceability of goods and provide more accurate estimates of times and routes based on reported incidents. In any case, SIMPLE's new features will optimize the system's efficiency and operation and improve the user experience for both private operators and the Public Administration.
Among these new features, SIMPLE incorporates interoperability with the Spanish Directorate General of Traffic's (DGT) TRAZA platform to facilitate the management of special permits for goods transport and heavy goods vehicles. This would allow for dynamic adjustments to authorized routes for special transport based on actual traffic conditions, improving safety and efficiency.
Similarly, the SIMPLE platform makes data registration more flexible, allowing any participant to register without requiring the shipment to be initiated by a shipper or transport operator. Furthermore, it integrates the processing of successive or combined transport, so that a single waybill can provide traceability for shipments involving multiple carriers.
SIMPLE will also enable the joint signing of documents related to transport, the viewing of location or other information of means of transport and equipment (at least trucks, wagons, locomotives, trailers and containers) to the interested parties, and will offer the user a clearer graphical representation of the tracking of shipments based on georeferencing.
Furthermore, SIMPLE is evolving to establish the national eFTI Gate and become certified as an eFTI platform, complying with the standards established in the European eFTI (Electronic Freight Transport Information) Regulation, which establishes the legal framework for the electronic communication of information.
With all these new features, the new technological platform will facilitate the secure exchange of information between operators and government agencies, as well as anticipate incidents , optimize multimodal coordination , and ensure full connectivity between the Spanish logistics ecosystem and the European digital environment. In any case, these measures will result in higher service quality and more efficient knowledge transfer between teams.
Commitment to digitalization
SIMPLE's objective is to place Spain at the forefront of Europe in the digitalization of the logistics sector, facing the challenge of combining and reusing, between different sectors and different modes of transport, the volume of data available today, in order to access new business models and value-added services.
SIMPLE was launched on November 28, 2023, as a decentralized platform that promotes interoperability between different existing digital systems and platforms. This platform also allows any transportation stakeholder interested in using the services offered to interact, strengthening relationships between private stakeholders and between these stakeholders and public administrations.
The platform is aligned with EU transport policy and the Mobility Strategy developed by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility. It aims to transform the logistics chain through interoperability, process optimization, real-time traceability, and reduced operating costs and times, facilitating the secure exchange of information between operators and government agencies.
The SIMPLE system comprises business procedures and rules, as well as a shared semantic and data model. It also features an Application Programming Interface (API) for data exchange between operators in the transport and logistics sectors, and between these operators and public administration bodies. All of this is supported by a single, integrated digital platform.
As a collaborative space for data exchange, the platform also has a user support service for the management, attention and resolution of queries and incidents that may be required by the different operators of the system and the digital platform.
_ Success in the SIMPLE pilot project
Together with Adif, we carried out the test that demonstrated the viability of SIMPLE, its platform for traceability on railway routes, in July 2023.
