Company

The client is providing complete fixing solutions for any size of building project. They offer a wide range of infrastructure and installation products for residential and commercial construction as well for civil engineering and industry. It is a family business with 13 locations throughout the Netherlands and more than 400 employees.

Situation

Due to anticipated sales growth the board requested a review of the current European logistics footprint (warehousing and logistics), to define the business case for the future warehouse set up and required transport (inbound, intercompany and outbound).

The new footprint should support the business to optimize cost, inventory and service level.

Approach

We started by describing the “as is” to create an objective of the organization. This involved reviewing warehouse productivity, mapping growth assumptions and building a dataset with the anticipated future material flows.

Next we determined scenarios​ for potential new logistics footprints and simulated the transport and warehousing cost and the CO2 emissions linked to transport.

Together with the client we translated business requirements into a scorecard to rate the different scenarios.

Results

Besides the design of a new European logistics footprint we identified other opportunities to improve logistics costs. For example, productivity in the warehouses was one of these other opportunities. An action list has been prepared to improve this. All opportunities combined resulted in a possible saving of 30% on logistics costs.