We have chosen to write our thesis within a transport company. The work was carried out at DHL activities in Uppsala. DHL is one of the leading transport companies worldwide. Our interest lies in more efficient and advanced transportation and terminals, as globalization and new trends require effective solutions.

The aim of our work is to explain the need for information technology applications in road haulage and associated terminal operations. Furthermore, we analyses terminal and applied information technology. Finally, we give suggestions on possible improvements to the process of IT applications in the future.

Selected methods based on literature search, interviews and observations are used. We did a contextual inquiry i.e. we tried to observe what is being done, and at the same time, we asked the user come with explanations of what they have done. The questions varied during the research because the atmosphere was dynamic so that the constancy and coherence are not important to us.

Globalization requires effective and dynamic transport and management in the terminal operations. The assumption for Transport Company to be competitive on the market is the introduction of information technology. The most common way to identify the goods of the terminal is the use of barcodes. Furthermore there are several different methods such as RFID, 3G, RFID, combined with satellite and NGWS, but these methods are considered expensive.

The future is in real-time information and an unlimited visibility that could be achieved with new trends in information technology. RFID will replace bar code identification with the price of RFID tags. A combination of 3G RFID with GPS and introducing NGWC in the future will be a prerequisite for unlimitedly comprehensive view, safe transportation and permanent access to information.