Delivery peaks for incoming goods smoothed out
Transparency over all external goods receipts
Administrative costs saved
TRAVECO Transporte AG, founded in 1998, is one of the largest logistics companies in Switzerland and a 100% subsidiary of the Swiss agricultural cooperative fenaco. The cooperatively organised company is active with other subsidiaries in four strategic business areas - from agriculture and the food industry (e.g. as a beverage producer) to energy trading (AGROLA) and retail (LANDI and Volg).
TRAVECO is on the road with more than 350 trucks as a logistics service provider for LANDI Schweiz AG, among others, which operates around 280 sales outlets in Switzerland. In the field of warehouse logistics, TRAVECO also provides its customers with large staging areas in the cross-docking/transhipment warehouse and more than 60,000 pallet storage spaces in block, rack and open-air warehouses.
Due to the Corona pandemic, TRAVECO has had to cope with a significantly increased volume in transport and warehouse logistics since 2020. For this reason, the company launched a major digitization project under the leadership of Christian Clauss (Head of IT & Digital Transformation) in order to replace the more than 1 million paper delivery bills that have been used to date with a digital process in the future.
The first talks between TRAVECO and TradeLink took place in September 2021. As part of the digitalisation project and the first task, TradeLink was to digitalise the notification and planning process in the goods receiving area of the TRAVECO logistics centre. This was previously a warehouse with five ramps in the inbound area, an external warehouse and a rail siding. All inbound transports were registered by the suppliers by phone, email or PDF and then manually entered into a central Outlook calendar by TRAVECO employees.
This resulted in a greater expenditure of time and was also prone to errors. In addition, there were sometimes severe delivery peaks with an offset of up to three hours between the planned and actual arrival time. The end result was waiting times at yard, traffic jams in front of Sites and, last but not least, numerous overtime hours for employees and external staff.
To smooth out these delivery peaks, TRAVECO had previously tested a home-made Excel/Outlook solution and later tried to map the delivery processes in its ERP system. Since both only worked to a limited extent, the company looked for external solutions.
The decision in favour of TradeLink was made due to the software's wide range of functions combined with intuitive user interface. With the support of the digitalisation team at TRAVECO, TradeLink was implemented in the logistics centre within 24 hours.
This was immediately followed by the rollout to all external supply partners. TradeLink's Roll-Out Manager Lisa Mischke had surprisingly little to do: "Thanks to the great IT team at TRAVECO, we had to provide very little support. TRAVECO carried out the process completely independently, and the customers also adopted TradeLink immediately of their own accord!"
This also impressed Patrick Müller, who was responsible for the implementation as Head of Projects at TRAVECO: "Now we are TradeLink's biggest fans!" he says happily.
As part of the implementation of TradeLink, TRAVECO has introduced laptops at inbound . With them, delivery bills are uploaded paperlessly at the ramp and status points are set for all deliveries so that they are visible to everyone in the system.
In addition, all processes carried out with TradeLink are analysed: This creates transparency not only for TRAVECO itself, but also for its customers.
It quickly became clear that the digitalisation process with TradeLink at TRAVECO was a complete success. Today, waiting times in the logistics centre are a thing of the past. Because all external customers and their delivery partners are integrated on the platform, the notification rate for external inbound transports via TradeLink is now 100 percent.
And this has - through better smoothing of delivery peaks - reduced waiting times to almost zero. The efficiency gains are considerable: staff can now be allocated according to the actual volume of deliveries.
Thus, not only have the throughput times of the deliveries been optimised, but the administrative effort has also been significantly reduced.
The fact that customers and delivery partners now book themselves in independently saves a lot of time that would otherwise be lost in coordination.
TradeLink is an important part of TRAVECO's planned logistics digitalisation process. The next joint milestones include the creation of an interface to TRAVECO's TMS (Transport Management System) and WMS (Warehouse Management System). Furthermore, the TradeLink check-in terminal is to be rolled out in the logistics centres.
TradeLink is currently also being implemented there for all internal and outbound transports. The move to the new logistics centre in Nebikon will take place in summer 2022.
This goes hand in hand with a doubling of warehouse capacity to over 60,000m² and incoming and outgoing goods at what will then be 27 ramps, all of which will be mapped on TradeLink.
Calculate here how much savings you can realise with TradeLink based on your weekly transport volume.
.png)
