Page title: The Unitec D GmbH case
Translated content:
Unitec D was born in response to companies' requirements to optimize and reduce the costs generated by the management of an increasingly complex international supply.
Unitec D (High Tech Industrieprodukte Vertriebs GmbH), is a company based in Augsburg (Germany), founded at the end of the 1980s on the initiative of the Italian entrepreneur Vincenzo Marino, who had acquired significant experience in the field of large automation systems for the construction of automobile engines worldwide.
Unitec D was born in response to the demands of companies to optimize and reduce costs generated by the management of an increasingly complex international supply. The concepts and services relating to Integrated Procurement and Procurement Outsourcing (not to be confused with Purchasing activities) that Unitec has developed to meet the needs of its customers have fully satisfied customer expectations, generating significant growth momentum for the German company.
The guarantee of a minimum saving of 25% on operating costs that Unitec confirms to its customers arises, beyond its specific skills, from the high degree of automation of the processes implemented and from the inter-company networking in which the company has invested and continues to invest significant resources.
To create these systems, Unitec has its own structure for the development of client/server applications dedicated to the paperless management of procurement processes and which, with the arrival of the Internet, gave birth to the first e-procurement activities.
The company therefore had the merit of characterizing and taking advantage, with a considerable head start, of the possibility of obtaining substantial cost reductions linked to the management of supply processes, thanks to 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 its customers of fixed business costs into variable costs and, at the same time, their reduction. In this way, customers of the service can devote themselves exclusively and calmly to their own strategic core business activities, by delegating all the managerial processes which normally absorb economic and professional resources, diverted from other business activities.
Customer companies also obtain a series of additional savings based on purchasing aggregation and international industrial brokerage activity.
The delegation of procurement activities to Unitec makes it possible to maintain stable relationships established with its own suppliers, to the extent that the choice of suppliers remains the total responsibility of the customer. The sole management of the procurement processes, up to the payment of invoices, is therefore delegated to outsourcing.
The company has continued, and still continues, to develop advanced concepts and services for companies (also public), among which we can mention the Virtual Warehouse with some of its specializations:
- Virtual Hospital (for a health district)
- Air-conditioned Virtual Warehouse (for an agricultural and agri-food district)
The Virtual Warehouse
Unitec offers advanced solutions for logistics and supplies (elogistics – eprocurement), by offering an integrator based on Information. Client companies have the opportunity to also use services and tools that enable common supplies and shared warehouses.
The Virtual Warehouse actually represents an opportunity to optimize inventory management and “replenishments”.
This solution has been studied above all for all those companies or agencies which are part of one or more industrial districts or value chains.
New information and communication technologies offer the possibility of sharing information, goods and services.
An example is that of company inventory management, where a specialized and neutral operator with respect to all companies in the district, which 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 stocks of each company and centrally provides the replenishment activities of those selected.
The conditions for achievement are:
- a logistics standard and communication
- a relative geographical proximity of client companies (50 km radius)
The stocks of each company participating in the plan immediately decrease but, paradoxically, availability increases. The transformation of a “physical” object into a “virtual” object is achieved 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, rather than their virtual state, which is considered within the E.V. for which we can define it as a physico-informatics hybrid. Information sharing then makes it possible to rationalize and outsource the management of stocks, physically present in company warehouses.
Through the EV, stocks are represented by the sum of members, made available by companies participating in the same EV and which operate in the same territory. The model therefore finds its particular point of reference in industrial districts, where it is possible to share raw materials, semi-finished products and spare parts.
With the E.V., we offer all companies in the district a reduction in stocks to be stored, without having to give up immediate availability of the same in case of necessity, and this thanks to a managerial, logistics and IT system that allows real-time control of all the information necessary for the coordinated and complete management of the use of these stocks. In the event of use of stocks by a company, beyond the limits of its own availability, Unitec, via the computer system, immediately withdraws the goods from the warehouse of a company belonging to the same (or neighboring) district, and replenishes the same goods from the supplier.
The entire district therefore functions as a single factory where the E.V. is physically made up of all the warehouses owned by the different companies, the management of which is however entrusted virtually to Unitec.
The savings achievable within industrial districts therefore have a great impact on the entire national value chain.
Companies can therefore reorganize their stocks according to the availability of the EV. and their own operational needs. Participants can therefore order delivery of the materials they need online 24 hours a day.
With the E.V., inventory management is standardized and the recycling of obsolescence, allowing an increase in warehouse rotation and the availability of items, previously limited by the existence of traditional type management. Companies interconnected in such a system are also guaranteed availability of materials that far exceeds what they previously had, as stocks are not present in their own warehouse.
Obviously, the more companies participate in the implementation of such solutions, the lower the quotas of material to be stored, and at the same time, the greater the quotas of material available.
