One standard warehouse management system for five central depots

hagebau Handelsgesellschaft für Baustoffe mbH & Co.KG is a consortium to which 248 partners from the building and timber trades belong, with more than 900 retail locations in all of Germany. Specialized traders for building materials make up the greater part of the retail locations. After this come approximately 300 do-it-yourself stores and around 100 timber merchants. Five high performance central warehouses, each with an assortment of 9000 products, cater for the high availability levels of the hagebau partners.

The requirements

In view of the heterogeneous business and article structure, the company philosophy of hagebau is one of standardisation as a fundamental means of remaining competitive. The same applies to the logistics. The five central depots are constructionally identified through narrow-aisle storage and wide-aisle storage. To date they had been administered from different IT systems.

viaLog’s input

Co-operating closely with the hagebau project team, viaLog has been able to create a requirement specification for a warehouse management system (WMS) within three months.
An invitation to tender and quotation appraisals from ten bidders followed in just six weeks. In a third stage viaLog and hagebau visited reference facilities of software suppliers. viaLog led price negotiations and supported hagebau afterwards with the drawing up of the contract with the chosen software supplier.
viaLog directed the implementation and introduction of the software and the new hardware landscape at all five locations through the phases of drawing up specifications, in house tests, commissioning, and live operation tests up until acceptance.

The solution

With the specification requirements and the invitation to tender, as well as the introduction of a new WMS which is functionally suitable for all five locations, a homogenous IT standard was created for the logistics.
The new system has several advantages: reduced costs, transparency in the logistics process, simplicity of interfaces.

 back