Press Report
OMV uses innovative solution for tracing tank wagons
(Logistik 07.2007) Due to the significant enlargement of its production capacities and the consequent doubling of its stock of tank wagons the OMV Group was faced with the challenge of finding new ways for tracing these tank wagons. Therefore, the leading oil and gas group in Central Europe implemented a professional fleet management solution which even makes cross-border loading device transactions transparent. In this way, a basis for the valid tracking and the maintenance planning for the leased tank wagons was provided.
The OMV was one of the first companies in this sector which decided to bring more transparency into the planning and monitoring of its own tank wagon circulation by means of an innovative IT-solution. The OMV produces fuels in Germany, Austria and Romania and distributes them across Europe. In view of the increase in the production capacities and a volume of approximately 80.000 tank wagon transactions per year the manual organisation of the tank wagon management reached its limit. Thus, at the central location in Vienna the status of the tank wagon stock at the five other loading locations was not immediately apparent, for example. Therefore, inet-logistics, a company from Wolfurt, was instructed to develop and implement an IT-solution for the complete and cross-company tank wagon inventory management, including an anticipatory tank wagon inventory planning.
"inet-logistics convinced us because of the high flexibility of the solution, because of the verifiable efficiency and above all also because of its extensive experience in the transport sector. The fact that it is an open Internet solution is also an advantage, especially in the international context," explains Melitta Wadsack, Head of Department Strategic Logistics at the OMV, the reasons for choosing this provider.
After an intensive, joint analysis of the actual state of affairs the solution suite logistics-server® by the software provider was implemented within only a few months as an inventory managing tank wagon system. The solution which was especially developed for the OMV takes the various despatch systems at the various filling locations into account and obtains the master data from the inventory managing systems. The solution proves its high degree of flexibility when it comes to the cross-country integration of the rail systems. For the first time ever a system was implemented which directly integrates the different rail systems of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
If required, the OMV can see with the aid of the new solution at short notice which tank wagon is located where, what is in the tank wagon and how much of it and when will it reach its destination. A "traffic light system” furthermore identifies those wagons which have already exceeded their originally planned transport time. Through the newly won transparency it will be possible in the future to plan and control the respective processes in a much simpler and less complicated manner. One of the positive effects: the total stock of leased tank wagons can be reduced in the future after the manual planning which is also based on experience has been replaced by the new system. Then it will be possible, for example, to limit the number of tank wagons which are kept in reserve for dealing with short-term transport peaks to the necessary minimum.
Another advantage of the software concerns the optimisation of the management for damaged wagons. The software records reports on damages, coordinates the times at the repair shop and indicates when which wagon will be available again. Furthermore, the solution traces the observance of the contractually committed maintenance intervals for each wagon which gets used.
After the logistics-server® had been implemented none of the users was able to imagine work without the new software. The potential for the extended use of the software is also available: amongst other things it would be possible in the future to transfer the consolidated and edited data to the SAP business warehouse for direct further processing or to balance the bundled data automatically with the freight and lease invoices. Thereby, processes for the freight and lease charge control could be further optimised.