The Unitec D emerged from companies' need to optimize and reduce costs that arise from managing more and more international supply chains.
Unitec D (High Tech Industrieprodukte Vertriebs GmbH) is a company based in Augsburg (Germany), founded in the late 1980s on the initiative of the Italian entrepreneur Vincenzo Marino, who had gained extensive experience in the field of large automation systems for the production of vehicles on a global scale.
Unitec D was created to answer companies' needs to optimize and reduce costs that arise from managing increasingly international supply chains. The concepts and associated services of integrated procurement and outsourcing of supply chains (not to be confused with purchasing activities) that Unitec developed to meet customer requirements have fully met customer expectations and provided the German company with an important growth impetus.
The guaranteed cost savings of at least 25% in operating costs that Unitec guarantees its customers results not only from special skills, but also from the high degree of automation of the implemented processes and from the cross-company networking in which the company has always invested and continues to invest considerable resources.
To implement these systems, Unitec has equipped itself with its own structure for the development of client/server applications, which are specifically designed for the paperless management of procurement processes and which later, with the advent of the Internet, paved the way for the first E-Procurement-Activities opened.
The company therefore has the merit of having recognized and taken advantage of the opportunity to achieve significant cost savings through the management of supply chains via the Internet and to implement the concepts of outsourcing and industrialization in the management, processing and transmission of information.
The mission that Unitec pursues is the continuous conversion of fixed costs into variable costs for its customers and at the same time reducing them. In this way, customers can devote themselves exclusively and worry-free to their strategic core business activities and delegate all management processes that normally absorb economic and human resources and thus distract from other business areas.
The customer companies also achieve further savings through the aggregation of purchases and international industrial broker activities.
Delegating delivery activities to Unitec makes it possible to keep the established relationships with our own suppliers stable, as the selection of suppliers remains entirely the responsibility of the customer. Therefore, only the management of the supply chain processes up to invoice payment is outsourced.
The company has developed and continues to develop advanced concepts and services for companies (including public ones), including the “Virtual Warehouse” with its specializations:
- Virtual Hospital (for a health district)
- Refrigerated virtual warehouse (for an agricultural and food district)
The Virtual Warehouse
Unitec offers advanced solutions for logistics and procurement (e-logistics – e-procurement) and positions itself as an information-supported integrator. Customer companies have the opportunity to also use services and tools that enable shared deliveries and warehouse use.
The Virtual Warehouse is actually a way to optimize the management of stocks and reorders.
This solution was designed in particular for all those companies or institutions that are part of one or more industrial districts or that form links in a value chain.
The new information and communication technologies actually offer the possibility of sharing information, goods and services.
An example is the management of business inventories, in which a specialized and neutral operator towards all companies in the district, which ensures and guarantees transparency for all participants in the system, namely UNITEC, creates a virtual warehouse that consists of the sum of the individual company warehouses and stocks and centrally coordinates the reordering activities.
The conditions for realization are:
- a logistics standard and a communication standardization
- a relative geographical proximity of the customer companies (radius of 50 km)
The inventory of every company participating in the system immediately decreases, but paradoxically, availability increases. The transformation of a “physical” object into a “virtual” is achieved by combining “possession of a good” with the possibility of “accessing a good”.
The Virtual Warehouse is actually an expression of the possible uses of these transformations. It is both the physical state and the virtual state of the objects within the V.L. are taken into account, which is why we can define it as a physical-information technology hybrid solution. The exchange of information then makes it possible to streamline and outsource the management of the stocks physically present in the company warehouses.
Through the V.L. the holdings are represented by the sum of the members, provided by the companies that are on the same V.L. participate and who operate in the same area. The model therefore finds its particular reference point in industrial districts, where there is the possibility of sharing raw materials, semi-finished products and spare parts.
With the V.L. All companies in the district are offered a reduction in stocks to be stored without sacrificing availability at all times, thanks to a management, logistics and IT system that allows real-time control of all the information necessary for the coordinated and complete management of stocks. If a company needs inventory beyond its own availability, Unitec uses the IT system to immediately remove the goods from the warehouse of a company belonging to the same district (or neighboring) and to reorder these goods from the supplier.
The entire district therefore functions as a single factory, with the V.L. physically consists of the property warehouses of the various companies, but the management of which is virtually entrusted to Unitec.
The savings that can be achieved within the industrial districts therefore have a major impact on the entire national value chain.
Companies can therefore manage their inventories exactly according to the availability of the V.L. and reorganize to meet your operational needs. Participants can therefore request the delivery of the required materials online 24 hours a day.
With the V.L. The management of stocks is standardized and the wear and tear of stocks is reduced, allowing an increase in stock turnover and availability, which was previously linked to the presence of a traditional form of management. The companies integrated into such a system therefore also have the guarantee of material availability that goes far beyond what was previously available, since the stocks are not only available in their own warehouse.
Obviously, the more companies participate in the implementation of such solutions, the smaller the proportion of materials to be stored becomes, and at the same time the larger the proportion of available materials becomes.
