Midl BV Integrated Logistics live with eLog WMS

Midl BV Integrated Logistics went live with eLog on April 1st, 2009.

Midl has been established in 2004 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, offering Ocean freight, Air freight, Warehousing, Road Haulage and Express freight services. Midl was formed by the employees having an average personal experience of over 20 years with the operations in three different locations. Its network is established and widely spread across the world to meet customer’s requirements. Midl logistics platform is supported by Joint participants and most of its shareholders hold own Trucks and Logistics real estates hence it forms an umbrella in terms of their services and the market approach to its customers. Midl has a wide range of customers ranging from Suppliers of high values computer peripherals, high end car cleaning products, industrial engineering products, packaging materials and even manufacturers of cosmetics and fragrances. By takeovers and fusions most of logistic companies have become continuously larger. For entrepreneurs in middle and small companies, this often means that the threshold to such a logistical service provider becomes very high. Midl is focused to remove this barrier and provides its logistical services particularly to mid and small size companies.

The challenge

The challenge for Midl is its growth strategy; which is to expand their warehousing and value added services. Most of Midl customers work with Midl to direct their entire external supply chain around the central warehousing, obviously inbound and outbound traffic flows occur. Besides these transport modalities MIDL also offers the following Value Added Services to its customers:

Repacking
Builds and Assembles Hardware within their warehouse in order to localize them for a specific country or a specific configuration

The real challenge for any WMS which MIDL chooses was to provide Visibility and Transparency for the above mentioned features in addition to the regular warehousing activities like In –bound and out –bound flows of the material. Owing to its rapid expansion, Midl was looking out for a system which offers cell division instead of an organization with many layers, to manage its multiple customers using their warehouse. Other challenges of Midl were streamlining:

Inbound processes including receiving and put away of stock, discrepancies in receipt and handling bonded stock.
Outbound processes including creation of orders, picking, packing and shipping of both bonded and non-bonded shipments.
Value addition services to customers like assembly and allocation of components on picks.
Internet orders - processing.
Inventory control including allocation of locations, replenishments and stock counts.

Midl looked nowhere when they wanted to implement a new warehouse system to manage its warehouse operations. Having worked with Four Soft successfully for its transportation management, it evaluated and implemented Four Soft’s 4S eLog, the warehouse management system to streamline its warehousing operations. Midl was seeking to automate its warehouse management processes, which seamlessly integrates with its transportation operations. It also wanted to offer customized services to its customers in terms of visibility of their stock which is being stored in Midl’s warehouseThis is where exactly, 4S eLog fits into MIDL business model for Warehousing. All it needed was a small amount of adjustment/customization and integration with the existing 4S eTrans SME to provide better Transparency and Visibility for the warehouse spreading over 25.000 sq.mt regular storage and pallet rackings with more than 10.000 sq.mt hazardous goods storage using about 180 pulling trucks.

The Solution

4S eLog, the WMS product offering from Four Soft, built on current technology platform - J2EE, covers the logistics environment from factory to consumer, allows multiple warehouses and multiple clients to be managed from within a single environment, has RF capabilities and offers visibility to clients, their customers and their suppliers, as well as across warehouses and clients. By implementing 4S eLog at Midl, all the inbound and outbound warehouse operations were automated and eliminated the manual environment.
An interface between the transportation system (4S eTrans SME) and warehouse management system (4S eLog) was established to allow the flow of information flow between the two systems minimising user input.

Last Updated on Friday, 01 May 2009 08:53