Unitec D was born in response to the demand of companies to optimize and reduce the costs generated by the increasingly complex management of international supplies.
Unitec D (High Tech Industrieprodukte Vertriebs GmbH), is a company based in Augsburg (Germany), born in the late 1980s at the initiative of the Italian businessman Vincenzo Marino, who had gained important experiences in the field of large automation systems for the construction of vehicle engines worldwide.
Unitec D was born in response to the demand of companies to optimize and reduce the costs generated by the increasingly complex management of international supplies. The concepts and related services of “Integrated Supply” and “Supply Outsourcing” (not to be confused with Purchasing activities) that Unitec has developed to satisfy the requirements of its clients, have fully met customer expectations, generating a significant growth momentum for the German company.
The guarantee of minimum savings of 25% in operating costs that Unitec confirms to its clients derives, in addition to the specific competencies, from the high degree of automation of the processes achieved and the inter-business interconnection in which the company has invested and always invests important resources.
To implement these systems, Unitec has provided itself with its own structure for the development of client/server applications dedicated to the paperless management of supply processes and which later, with the arrival of the Internet, have given way to the first e-procurement activities.
The company therefore has the merit of having characterized and taken advantage, with great advance, of the possibility of obtaining significant cost reductions linked to the management of supply processes, through the use of the network, the concepts of outsourcing and industrialization in the management, reception, processing and transmission of information.
The mission that Unitec pursues is the continuous transformation for clients of fixed business costs into variable costs and, at the same time, their reduction. In this way, clients can dedicate themselves exclusively and serenely to their own strategic Core business activities, delegating all management processes that normally absorb economic and professional resources, in fact diverted from other business assets.
Client companies also obtain a whole series of additional economies based on the aggregation of purchases and international industrial intermediation activity.
The delegation of supply activities to Unitec allows the relationships established with the suppliers themselves to be maintained stable, since the choice of suppliers remains the complete responsibility of the client. Therefore, the individual management of the supply processes is delegated to outsourcing, up to the payment of invoices.
The company has continued, and continues to continue, in developing advanced concepts and services for companies (also public) among which it is possible to mention the “Virtual Warehouse” with some of its specializations:
- Virtual Hospital (for a health district)
- Virtual Refrigerated Warehouse (for an agricultural and food district)
The Virtual Warehouse
Unitec offers advanced solutions for logistics and supplies (elogistics – eprocurement), proposing itself as an integrator based on Information. Client companies also have the possibility of making use of services and instruments that allow shared supplies and warehouses.
The Virtual Warehouse represents in fact a possibility of optimizing the management of supplies and “resupply”.
This solution has been studied above all for all those companies or agencies that are part of one or more industrial districts or constitute rings of a value chain.
New information and communication technologies in fact offer the possibility of sharing information, goods and services.
An example is that of the management of business supplies, where a specialized and neutral operator with respect to all the companies in the district, which therefore ensures and guarantees transparency for all participants in the plan, UNITEC precisely, creates a virtual warehouse composed of the sum of the individual warehouses and business supplies and centrally supplies the reordering activities of the shared items.
The condition for realization is:
- a logistics and communication standard
- a relative geographical proximity of the client companies (50 km radius)
The supplies of each company participating in the plan immediately decrease but, paradoxically, their availability increases. The transformation of a “physical” object into a “virtual” one is carried out by combining the “possession of a good” with the possibility of “access to a good”.
The Virtual Warehouse is in fact an expression of the use that can be made of these possible transformations. It is the physical state of objects, as well as their virtual state, that is considered within the A.V. so we can define it as a physical-computer hybrid. The sharing of information then allows us to rationalize and outsource the management of supplies, physically present in business warehouses.
Through the A.V. in fact, the supplies are represented by the sum of the members, made available by the companies participating in the same A.V. and that operate in the same territory. The model therefore finds its particular point of reference in industrial districts, where there is the possibility of sharing raw materials, semi-finished products and spare parts.
With the A.V., all companies in the district are offered a reduction in the supplies to be stored, without having to give up their immediate availability in case of need and this, thanks to a managerial, logistical and computer system that allows real-time control of all the information necessary for the coordination and total management in the use of the same supplies. In the event of use of supplies by a company beyond the limits of its own availability, Unitec, through the computer system, immediately proceeds to withdraw the goods from the warehouse of a company belonging to the same (or neighboring) district and to reorder the same goods to the supplier.
The entire district therefore works as a single factory where the A.V. It is physically constituted by the warehouses owned by the various companies, whose management is virtually entrusted to Unitec.
The economies obtainable within industrial districts therefore have a great impact on the entire national value chain.
Companies can consequently reorganize their supplies based exactly on the availability of the A.V. and your own operational needs. Participants can therefore request online delivery of the materials they need and this 24 hours a day.
With the A.V. Therefore, supply management is standardized and obsolescence is recycled, thus allowing an increase in warehouse turnover and availability, previously linked to the existence of traditional management. The companies interconnected in such a system therefore also have the guarantee of an availability of materials that goes well beyond what they previously had, as the supplies are not present in their warehouse.
Obviously, the more companies participate in such implementation of solutions, the lower the quotas of materials to be stored, and in parallel, the greater the quotas of available materials.
