For nearly a quarter century, ABB Poland has been a provider of equipment for the energy sector, an owner of three factories and an employer of 4.9 thousand people. The company’s products get to the markets of almost all countries in the world thanks to the use of an innovative logistics platform.
A limited control of transports, a delayed transfer of information between carriers and logistics operators and the process of forwarding orders to the transport companies being too slow – these are the problems faced by many production and trade companies. A few years ago, these were also the difficulties encountered by ABB, a leader of the automated technologies and energy market.
ABB corporation was founded over one hundred years ago. It has been present in Poland for a quarter century, having its plants in Łódź, Aleksandrów Łódzki, Przasnysz, Wrocław and its Corporate Research Centre in Kraków, where the Group’s Global Centre of Shared Services is located. The company hires more than 4.9 thousand people, and its sales exceed 3 billion PLN. Almost two-thirds of the products manufactured in Poland are sold in the foreign markets.
Logistics platform lowers transport costs
To make the operation of the supply chain more efficient, the company has decided to implement a logistics platform. Broadly speaking, it is a logistics program connecting all the participants of the supply chain, ensuring a safe control of the load and lowering the transport costs. In fact, the Platform makes a good alternative of the Transport Management System.
The Logistics Platform is a proprietary programme allowing forwarders to manage transport orders online and supporting the cooperation among the logistics department, the forwarding department and the driver. It facilitates communication, logistics processes and safety of data transfer.
This solution enables the users to cooperate only with the partners previously added to the base, so the data transfer is safer, and no information is able to get to the public. The orders are passed to the carriers in seconds, and the whole forwarding process is standardized, which prevents the threat of errors or misunderstandings.
All the necessary information about the order is displayed for the parties responsible for its completion. As some orders require the exchange of information between the interested parties, the Platform provides the function to add notes in a messenger. This function receives also the SMS messages sent by the driver.
The basic functionalities include:
– address database,
– forwarding orders and confirming deliveries,
– fleet management,
– document management,
– generating optimum routes,
– running online auctions,
– extended SMS monitoring.
The system also keeps an archive and generates statistics, sorted by relevant criteria.
Consolidation of loads from multiple factories
The implementation of a transport management tool has resulted in the optimization not only of the costs but also of the whole transport process in the company. It also has allowed us to cumulate in one place all the data from completely different modes of transport dedicated to our different production plants. Without these data, the load consolidation and efficient use of space in the means of transport – which in our opinion bring bigger benefits than negotiating transport rates – would not be possible, said Lucjan Krech, Transport & Packaging Manager in ABB Poland.
So, the solution applied by ABB has led to the improvement of the control over the whole transport system. In addition to the fact that orders are now being forwarded faster to the transport operators, the communication with the carriers and among the logisticians of AAB has also been highly improved.
Significant savings have been achieved thanks to the consolidation of loads sent from different factories and their export by one means of transport. A permanent monitoring of transport tasks is also very important. The statistics are gathered particularly to show the costs, punctuality and quality of the services rendered by the carriers.
Photo: ABB