(arvato Systems) Gütersloh / Unterpremstätten – Since the beginning of 2015, the Austrian trucking company Leitner Spedition has been working with the best4log-x transport management system. This SAP-based solution from arvato Systems provides an integrated digital information flow and supports mid-sized companies in achieving a transparent process design. Controlling and Reporting have seen a significant increase in their added value they since the implementation of best4log-x.
By introducing best4log-x, Leitner has incorporated a transport industry-specific solution into its software landscape that has enabled the company to retire a previous, outdated program. By doing so, this mid-sized business in Unterpremstätten, Austria, has gained an end-to-end digital information flow for all its logistical and commercial processes.
With nearly 30 transport units and 65 employees, Leitner is considered to be a mid-sized supplier of trucking and logistics services. But even so, on some routes Leitner punches well above its weight, offering stiff competition to the much larger industry giants. Working in conjunction with approximately 600 subcontractors, Leitner moves full loads and consolidated shipments well beyond the borders of Austria. Destinations include Southwest Europe, Germany, the Benelux countries and Great Britain.
“When we had to look for a new transport management system, we wanted a safe investment solution that would also impress customers,” says Leitner–s Herbert Bada, giving an interesting insight into the long-term strategy of this agile enterprise. “Because it–s not just our customers in the automotive supply industry that compare us with the market leaders. We need to constantly prove that we can compete with the big boys when it comes to transparency, process management and efficiency. That–s why we chose a solution with a good reputation that could also deliver high performance.”
best4log-x handles each of the individual steps for a new shipment. This includes work order management, disposition, loading and fleet management, determining shipping rates and billing and controlling. Among the principle changes that best4log-x has delivered are a consistent and interface-free flow of information, which replaces the creation and manual filing of a number of paper documents. Once created, the master data is available for use in each step of the ordering and invoicing process. This saves workers from having to constantly recreate data and reduces a number of sources for errors.
Among the advantages of this new transport management system, Herbert Bada includes complete transparency, a clean document flow and quick and easy availability of figures for reporting and controlling. “We have a consistent overview of every job.” He further illustrates the increase in efficiency the company has seen with the following example: “Previously, our controllers had to manually put together up to 300 preliminary bills of lading every Monday morning so that they could coordinate dispatching shipments with our freight carriers. Today, they take care of everything with a few mouse clicks, enabling them to complete not just this, but a variety of other tasks via best4log-x.
Pragmatic Customization
This SAP / best4log-x transport management solution was incorporated into live operations at the beginning of 2015. In advance of this, the project team – consisting of two employees each from Leitner and arvato Systems – prepared the implementation in a series of workshops. In support of this, a SAP ERP and best4log-x test environment was setup in the early summer of 2014. Many of the company–s shipping processes could be reproduced with the existing version of best4log-x. For those elements, however, that needed to be customized, the project team decided to take a very pragmatic approach. “We didn–t spend a lot of time wading through complex business blueprints or feasibility studies”, says arvato SAP Senior Consultant Friederike Gehring, describing the procedure. “Instead, the project team mapped out all the Leitner processes in the test environment using specific master data.” This best practice approach helped to systematically advance the customization process and kept the effort required for making individual adjustments within manageable limits. It also helped that Leitner made one of its controllers available – as it did later with a key system user – to exclusively be involved in the preparations for both the Go-Live and user training.
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