Products

Consolidation of worldwide transports

By Martina Haas

Mubea enhances service quality by using AX4

Seeking to continually refine its logistics processes, the automotive supplier Mubea (Muhr und Bender KG) looked at how it would need to design its workflows to combine flexibility with supply chain perfor- mance while optimizing its freight costs. The “Transport Desk” project developed solutions to ensure end-to-end processing, leverage cross-enterprise potential along the supply chain, and in so doing professionalize the organization to manage the increasing complexity of global supply chains.

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Using AX4’s state- of-the-art IT solu- tions made it possible for us to greatly enhance the flexibility, reliability, and quality of our transport manage- ment services.”

Arno Runte, Head of Corporate Logistics Muhr und Bender KG

Challenge

As Mubea saw it, the strategies for future optimization in the “Transport Desk” project had to go beyond mere price negotiations. A key factor was to increase productivity by achieving an appropriate and thus uninterrupted flow of information in the placement of transport orders.

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Solution

Mubea developed the “Transport Desk” using various approaches. The project uses the logistics platform AX4 to manage transport-related information. The cloud solution provides an online interface for entering shipments and lays the groundwork for a globally standardized process across all sites in collaboration with the participating partners. Reduced complexity goes hand in hand with greater agility to deal with changing conditions. All Mubea sites request transports using a standardized interface that it part of AX4. The platform handles all the relevant data for the operational transport management, including the parameters for final billing of the services rendered. The “Transport Desk” checks the orders, combines them where appropriate, and transmits them – along with the appropriate freight rate – to the carrier. Once the services have been rendered and documented, “Transport Desk” generates a credit to the service provider.

In return, Mubea gets a consolidated invoice with the account assignments pre-entered, making the downstream administrative processes much easier. AX4 also saves all the shipping data in a data pool. This creates a foundation of validated data to prepare and monitor the appropriate targets—one of the key prerequisites for a process of continuous improvement.

Success

Mubea leveraged state-of-the-art information management to greatly enhance the flexibility, reliability, and quality of its transport management services. The company has fully implemented AX4 in its European plants and plans to adapt and expand the technology to its operations in Asia and the Americas as well.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/digital-logistics/2024/01/08/consolidation-of-worldwide-transports/