Students put Ritra Cargo IT business case into practice

26 February 2020

A fresh look at logistics IT. A perfect task for the eyes of students taking a minor in Innovative Logistics & IT! Ritra Cargo likes working with educational institutions that offer logistics and IT courses. Over the last six months, it has been the turn of the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The fourth-year minor students set out to work on a real Ritra business case.

Getting stuck into real data

The aim of the assignment was to develop a Proof of Concept (PoC) for an online logistics platform. A PoC is a commonly used to test whether an idea could be successful. To find out, various activities were necessary, such as interviewing Ritra staff members, carrying out research and analysing data.

In total, 25 students worked on the assignment, split into groups of 4 or 5 people. The students had a few challenges to deal with:

• Working with live data and historical data
• Creating and managing user profiles
• Converting data into KPIs
• Making the logistics platform commercially interesting

Great collaboration between the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and Ritra Cargo was hugely important during PoC development. Ritra Cargo supplied the business case and the required data. The students were supported by the lecturers at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Award for the best PoC

The transformation of the business case into a PoC yielded some excellent and surprising results. After the final presentations were done, Ritra Cargo awarded a prize to thank the students for their efforts. The group of students with the PoC that translated our needs in the best way were awarded a voucher.

Ritra Cargo would like to thank all students for their valuable contributions to this project!

Collaboration between students and the business community

Great collaboration between schools and the business community is imperative. It helps students gain experience of real-life situations, while businesses benefit from the students’ youthful and refreshing viewpoints. As a freight forwarded, we are especially interested in learning about this generation’s approach to certain issues – having grown up in a different era. In short: a real win-win situation.

This is the reason Ritra Cargo works with students regularly: In 2019, we were very happy with intern Rozwitha, who completed her final thesis project with us. The same for intern Lucas, who was with us in 2018 and 2019 and completed work placements in various departments. Students from the Shipping and Transport College (STC) and the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences often fit right in at Ritra Cargo during their internship.

If you would like to find out more about an internship at Ritra Cargo, or if you offer a course that suits what we do, please contact us.