Standardized transportation planning across market outlets as well as constructions site

Saint-Gobain is headquartered in France and has a yearly turnover of around € 41 billion. The group designs, manufactures and distributes materials and solutions which can be found everywhere in our living spaces and daily life: in buildings, transportation, infrastructure and many industrial applications.

Improving collaboration across teams

Transportation costs in the construction materials industry are relatively high in relation to the goods value. Customer orders often need to be changed at short notice, during or even after planning. Having highly efficient routes is very important. As part of a supply chain digitization project, Saint-Gobain planned to further increase the productivity of transportation planning for the products of their subsidiaries ISOVER (thermal insulation) and Rigips (drywall-systems).

In addition, they were looking to maximize the utilization of their external forwarders’ truckloads. Dispatchers regularly planned up to 2 weeks in advance and reserved appropriate load space, as well as the number of trucks for the expected shipments. But they faced several integration hurdles.

Route planning for ISOVER-Products is organized at the central logistics headquarters in Ludwigshafen/Germany and Rigips-products are dispatched from Scholen/Germany. The two teams, which operate separately, were hardly able to support each other when planners fell sick or took time off. At times, this resulted in delivery problems.

Integrated Route Planning

To standardize company-wide transport planning processes, Saint-Gobain chose the ORTEC for SAP® integrated route planning solution. With the introduction of ORTEC for SAP®, a company-wide dispatching platform was set up. Transport planning processes were standardized. The system landscape was unified, avoiding cost-intensive interfaces. Route planning is now based on SAP Orders and SAP Deliveries. Full truck loads are automatically planned by the ORTEC add-on, while less than full loads are planned manually. All relevant information is automatically sent to Saint-Gobain’s contract freight forwarders or via a tender in their logistics platform, Transporeon. The complete SAP® worklist is accessible at any time. Orders can be selected in the ORTEC for SAP® status module.

Lower costs with optimized logistics

“Thanks to automated planning in ORTEC for SAP®, our planners save a lot of time day-to-day, especially when communicating with customer service and forwarders. The time saved can now be invested in improving rate management to find the best forwarder for the planned tour. We also have more time to solve difficult individual problems. Centralized planning with simple updates is another great advantage for us. Process standardization and high flexibility enable our dispatchers to take over the planning of other subsidiaries when needed." - Thomas Muschalla, Project Management, Saint-Gobain

The implementation of ORTEC for SAP® at ISOVER and Rigips enabled Saint-Gobain to optimize their logistics processes and significantly reduce costs. They are now able to combine cargo flows and products for these different brands and access common load space resources. Vehicle types are optimally matched to each order, based on unique requirements. Coordination time, previously spent on email and phone communication, was drastically reduced.

Automation possibilities and different approaches of ‘supra-regional planning’ or ‘region-based planning’ were met with a high-level of acceptance among the company’s planners. The software’s implementation went smoothly and stayed completely within budget. The project took less than 4 months in total. Given the positive results, Saint-Gobain plans to introduce ORTEC’s route planning solution in other subsidiaries and implement ORTEC’s Load Building module.