Case Study: In Search of Excellence
WE EXAMINE HOW EXEL LOGISTICS, BRITAIN'S BIGGEST WAREHOUSING AND DISTRIBUTION
COMPANY, USE COMPUTERISED FAX TO HELP MANAGE THEIR BUSINESS.
Exel Logistics is Britain's biggest warehousing and distribution
company. Owned by the giant NFC, the company moves and
stores more goods than virtually anyone else.
Exel Logistics numbers many of the UK's leading organisations
in its client list and at their Reading depot they run an entire
operation dedicated to serving the needs of one of Britain's
leading brewers - responsible for hundreds of pubs, inns, hotels,
motels, steak and pizza houses.
A major logistical task
As you would expect, the brewing giants demand the very
highest service from their suppliers, as Mike Lewis, Systems
Project Manager at Exel Logistics explains. 'It is our job to
handle the entire supply chain for the customer, from purchasing
through warehousing and distribution to invoicing.'
Ufax - business critical messaging
With a vast operation to manage, including daily communication
with hundreds of suppliers of perishable and non-perishable
foods, Exel Logistics turned to Ufax to automate and manage
purchase ordering on behalf of their customer.
Ufax is the Unix based fax module supplied by Centreline 2000 -
it can use both ASCII terminals and PC Windows clients. Ufax
will run stand-alone or integrates with Uniplex.
Lewis again. 'Everything you ever see in any of the customer's
outlets has been ordered, warehoused and delivered by us -
down to the last lettuce leaf. Its a massive - and time critical
operation - particularly with the perishable foods.'
'Our staff and EDI systems take orders every morning from the
brewers outlets around the country. Every afternoon we generate
hundreds of purchase orders to go to the food suppliers, for
delivery to us the same evening. We receive the goods and the
following morning we deliver to pubs, restaurants and hotels
nation-wide. The supply chain never stops. It runs 7 days a
week, 24 hours a day.'
Exel Logistics have long appreciated the role that IT has to play
in this type of operation. Their UNIX-based dedicated supply
management system Socrates, handles the overall business
process including interfaces into the company's own accounting
systems as well as the brewer's EDI link. But given the
continuing growth in the brewer's operations, the real challenge
has been finding a fax-based solution for communication with
brewer's suppliers.
High throughput
Lewis again, 'when you need to send between 300 and 500
purchase orders by fax every day - some of them over 100
pages long - you want a fax-solution that's utterly robust, reliable
and configurable. That's why we chose Ufax and built it in to our
application.'
The company had originally written its own bespoke software for
sending orders to a single fax-modem (a DCE FaxBox), but there
were limitations. 'with the size of the operation we really needed
more FaxBoxes to avoid potentially costly bottlenecks. That
meant an intelligent system for queuing the fax orders to multiple
FaxBoxes. We could have developed the software in-house but
the decision was taken that rather than re-invent the wheel, we
would seek an off-the-peg solution - providing it could fit our
unique requirements.'
Intelligent fax management
After evaluation, Exel Logistics selected Ufax. Lewis explains,
'we needed a solution that could support multiple fax queues to
several FaxBoxes. It had to offer batching intelligence - so that
multiple orders to the same supplier were automatically spooled
and sent as a single fax message. It had to be able to recover
properly from transmission errors and it had to be a proven
technology. We chose Ufax and the product hasn't let us down
since we rolled the system out in September.'
Overall, Exel Logistics are delighted with the results. 'The
product has solved the problem of ever-increasing volumes of
fax orders. The users of the system can leave the mechanics of
fax management entirely to Ufax. They can check the queues to
verify whether an order has been sent - or when it will go. Ufax
always reports back if a line was busy, or a transmission failed. If
there is a break in transmission on a large (100 page+) order,
the system automatically restarts from the point where the break
occurred.
Scope for growth
Best of all there is plenty of scope for growth. We are currently
issuing up to 500 orders a day using 3 FaxBoxes, but we have
the option to increase to this as necessary. I don't anticipate that
will require any further upheaval and that's important because
this business is growing daily!'
Solution summary:
Site: Exel Logistics depot at Reading
Problem:
To provide a fax-based purchase ordering system
capable of serving one of Britain's largest brewing, hotel and pub
chains. The system must intelligently queue and manage as
many as 500 orders per day as a part of the UNIX-based supply
management system.
Solution:
Integrate Ufax into the supply management system.
Use a number of UNIX-host connected FaxBoxes to send out the
purchase orders. All orders are placed in a central directory
where they are intelligently processed and queued by Ufax.
|
