Press Report
Taking over new production orders were the reason for Magna Steyr Automotive Engineering to redesign their entire transport management
(Verkehr 07.2006) When taking over the production of the Saab 9-3 convertible and the BMW X3 Magna Steyr was faced with the challenge of dealing with a massive increase in the transport volume, i.e., by 500 percent. The worldwide largest automotive developer and manufacturer therefore decided to introduce in the course of a complete process re-engineering a continuous IT-solution through the help of which the transport planning and monitoring together with the loading device management and the freight cost clearing can get automated and integrated. Only very few automotive manufacturers and suppliers have already created in this area continuous and integrated IT-structures. Magna Steyr has accepted this challenge and has created in a comprehensive project continuous structures in the fields transport management, loading device management and freight cost controlling. All processes have been fundamentally revised and harmonised.
In cooperation with the software providers inet-logistics and 4flow and the consortium manager Nexolab an integrated software solution was developed which is based on these conditions. The basis for it was the solution suite logistics-server by inet-logistics. The solution which was especially developed for Magna Steyr automates and integrates the different processes in such a way that, for example, relevant information from the loading device management can consequently flow into the transport planning and control. In this way it is possible to determine the ideal transport structure precisely while considering the exact requirements. The main objective of this optimisation is the reduction of freight costs. Thus, the automation and intelligent linking up of the transport and loading device management yields a convincing result for Magna Steyr: transport and process costs have been reduced drastically. "We were able to reach our original project aim even earlier than it was planned," explains Stefan Lasser, responsible project director at Magna Steyr Automotive Engineering. Another advantage for the company presents the transparency which was won by means of the automated freight cost clearing.