Webinar: National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy

The National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy sets the agenda for coordinated and well-planned government and industry action to 2040 and beyond, with a national vision for freight systems and supply chains to contribute to a strong and prosperous Australia.

The Strategy commits to action in four key areas:

• Smarter and targeted infrastructure,
• Enable improved supply chain efficiency,
• Better planning, coordination and regulation; and
• Better freight location and performance data.

This webinar will provide an overview of the following action items under the Strategy:

• National Freight Data Hub, a federated data-sharing network to provide open access to government data, help industry share data together, and collectively answer the big questions about Australia’s freight performance and how we can improve it.
• Supply Chain Benchmarking Dashboard, a web-based data visualisation tool that provides detailed and interactive modelling of Australian transport and logistics supply chains across road and rail. A total of 150 commodities are available with a variety of capabilities including enhanced geographic filtering.
• National Urban Freight Planning Principles, seven high-level principles endorsed by Australian, state and territory governments that provide guidance for land use decision-making across all levels of government to improve planning for freight in Australia’s metropolitan areas.

The webinar will be presented by Georgia O’Cianain, Andrew Higgins and Deb Fearns.

Georgia O’Cianain will showcase the National Freight Data Hub’s prototype website, demonstrating the value of improved freight data, and outline the Hub’s goals and 13 key projects.

Andrew Higgins will demonstrate how users can use the Supply Chain Benchmarking Dashboard to compare supply chain metrics across commodities and transportation paths and use the new geographical filtering to get deeper insights on supply chains.

Deb Fearns will provide a detailed overview of what the National Urban Freight Planning Principles are and how they operate, including why they’re needed, how they were developed, what their aim is, and what they mean for all levels of government and industry.

There will be opportunities for questions and answers at the end of the session.

Georgia O’Cianain is Director, National Freight Data Hub, Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. Georgia is an experienced strategic urban policy professional with a career spanning 20+ years of planning & transport policy and reform across all three levels of government in Australia.

Andrew Higgins is a Senior Scientist at the CSIRO Land and Water business unit, based in Brisbane, Australia. He joined CSIRO in 1996, with a passion in developing novel methods to optimise agriculture transport & logistics to increase profitability across the supply chains. He started his career developing tools to better manage seasonal harvest planning of sugarcane in Australia, and improving the logistics between harvesting sugarcane, transportation to the mill and marketing.

From 2012, Andrew led the development of Transport Network Strategic Investment Tool (TraNSIT). Andrew received his PhD from Queensland University of Technology in 1996 on the topic of optimising rail freight timetables.

Deb Fearns is Assistant Director, National Freight and Supply Chain Strategy Implementation Unit, Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. Deb has had an extensive career in federal government, working for a number of different agencies leading the implementation of government projects and programs. Most recently, she led a major COVID-19 response program in the aviation sector and worked with all levels of government in the Department’s City Deals division.

No charge but registration is essential.

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