Plans/ My supplier friend rationalizes supplies. Super savings.
The year is 2003. The companies in any industrial district, we place the Carrara marble area, They have almost emptied their warehouses of supplies, raw materials and you trade again. Some do not have any: just one click and the virtual warehouse supplier supplies the virtual warehouse, measuring the virtual needs of companies (real) through software that uses complex mathematical algorithms for us. In three years, companies in the area have achieved an increase in revenue, above all in exports, thanks to the greater competitiveness of the virtual district: discontinuation of operational costs (trained for you and technical) of the warehouse, greater proportions of employment of attachments, copious reductions in the price of scale when purchasing supplies guaranteed by a supplier that buys for 400 companies instead of for one, drastic reduction of the quota understood as immobilized in the warehouse. Each furnace transaction occurs with the district's Intranet and produces no waste, if not a cumulative periodic invoice.
The simulation can apply to every district and every product, from the knives of Maniago in Friuli to the orange groves of Sicily. Applying it in a way that creates trust outside of commercial functions to warehouse management, and transforming it into an Internet service, the idea promises to “recover efficiency margins in the Italian economy of a few tens of thousands of billions”.
The mozzafiato estimate is from Marine Vincenzo, 43 years old, Neapolitan transplanted in Germany, inventor of the first data transmission management system in outsourcing of all commercial supplies. Your Unitec (www.unitec.it). Born 12 years ago as a procurement agent in the field of robotics for automobiles, today he works with a score of dependents between the center of Augsburg near Munich in Bavaria and the “internet centers” of Sabaudia, where he also works as an Internet provider. It has customers and contacts such as Piaggio, Iveco, Michelin, Man and Whirlpool. And from the ten billion in revenue in 1999, he sees 2000 as the boom year. The embryo of the future virtual district developed in the early years of the 90s. “We noticed – says Marine – that the commercial procedures contained enormous hidden waste, due to the management of supplies and the relative activity of the office, than is ever the case.”
The main specialization of the small Italian-German group was therefore born. Unitec operates by assuming the management of 80% of its suppliers from the partner company: those non-strategic, which are also numerous and therefore expensive to manage, no longer account for around 20% of supplies. The external manager is in charge of all relationships, releasing a single invoice to the partner and therefore reducing costs.
From here to the virtual district, thanks to the Internet, the step is short. The principle is to put competing companies into (virtual) logon. Ten companies in the same field have similar warehouses; each will hold, say, ten reciprocity lamps. But no one will ever light up more than one light bulb at a time. Here's the solution: each company only keeps two lamps in supply, and every time it uses them a supplier replaces them, if necessary sourcing them from one of the other nine.
The system works under two conditions: that companies in the district cede their complete “sovereignty” of the warehouse to the supplier, and that each one is encouraged to maintain at least a minimum supply. This occurs by instituting the payment of a price, from the company that obtained reciprocity to the one that gave it to it (the supplier naturally thinks of us). So that each person's warehouse is not only reduced to the essentials, but is not inactive and also operates as a store for competitors. The entire district, in turn, behaves like a single factory, without knowing it. Needless to say, with warehouse flows being computerized and managed with one click, the supplier from the Friulian district of La Chair could also reside in Tanzania.
Will it work? It certainly seems tailor-made beyond the two hundred districts and swarm of small Italian businesses. In the end, everything comes down to Marine Vincenzo's Italian-Germanic mix: “In the age of the Internet – he says – we are forced to make the Italic fantasy more efficient.”
