Converting a fleet of road tankers to light weight tank containers
The challenge:
For several decades, one of our European customers specializing in the transportation of liquid bulk cargo has been serving plants across the continent with an extensive fleet of road tankers.
Business was thriving in volumes but the margins were shrinking : the cost of operating road tankers, associated with the increase in maintenance costs of an ageing fleet was becoming unsustainable.
The Problem: An ageing and costly fleet
Each road tanker required regular service intervals, immobilizing the vehicle for an estimated time of 1 to 3 days each time – which accumulate easily to a week or more of downtime per year.
This unavoidable downtime represented a calculative operational loss anywhere between 1% and 3 % per trailer. Meanwhile, the ageing fleet required frequent repairs, leading to rising maintenance costs, ad-hoc disturbance of the daily operation, delivery delays and ultimately disappointed customers.
Facing economic pressure in a highly competitive market, the company decided tocompletely rethink its transportation model and started to look for alternatives.
The Solution: Lightweight 35 CBM Swap Body TankContainers IMO4 / L4BH with baffles
After deep evaluation of all parameters, the company found a solution by using specially configured 35 cbm Swap Body Tankcontainers, which Raffles Lease has now added to its product portfolio.
Tangible benefits
The Tangible Benefits which led to this decision are:
- Initial investment reduced by around 50%: the traditional road tanker is twice more expensive than Raffles lease Lightweight Swap Body Tankcontainer on a chassis.
- Payload optimization: This Tankcontainer can transport more product, due to the significantly reduced TARE weight, which makes transport more profitable
- Multimodal flexibility: This Tankcontainer is compatible with rail transport (RID) and road transport (ADR)
- Application flexibility: This Tankcontainer can be stacked in empty and loaded condition without the chassis, to ensure supply chain stability and optimal use of storage space
- Reduced downtime: This Tankcontainer is not linked to its chassis, which enables maintenance of both components independent from each other
- Variety of products: These Tankcontainer type approvals allow a wide range of products to be transported
- Technical specifications: This Tankcontainer has been configured with a focus on European Intermodal transports, as a replacement for road tankers. (see Raffles specifications for details)
A key advantage is the system’s flexibility: a single chassis can be used to move multiple Tankcontainers in a given amount of time, which eliminates the inefficiencies of road tankers