The case Unitec D GmbH
Unitec D was created to respond to the need of companies to optimize and reduce costs generated by the increasingly complex management of international procurement.
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 gained important experience in the sector of large automation systems for the construction of vehicle engines worldwide.
Unitec D was created to respond to the need of companies to optimize and reduce costs generated by the increasingly complex management of international procurement. The concepts and related services of "Integrated Supply" and "Procurement Outsourcing" (not to be confused with purchasing activities) that Unitec has developed to meet the requirements of its customers have fully met customer expectations, generating an important growth impulse for the German company.
The guarantee of a minimum saving of 25% on operating costs that Unitec confirms to its customers derives not only from the specific skills, but also from the high degree of automation of the processes implemented and from the interconnection between companies for which the company has invested and continues to invest significant resources.
For the creation of these systems, Unitec equipped itself with its own structure for the development of client/server applications dedicated to the dematerialized management of procurement processes and which subsequently, with the advent of the Internet, gave rise to the first e-procurement activities.
The company therefore has the merit of having characterized and exploited, well in advance, the possibility of obtaining significant cost reductions linked to the management of procurement 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 of company fixed costs into variable costs for customers and, at the same time, their reduction. In this way, customers of the service can dedicate themselves exclusively and peacefully to their strategic core business activities, delegating all the management processes that normally absorb economic and professional resources, effectively taken away from other company activities.
Client companies also obtain a series of additional economies based on purchasing aggregation and international industrial intermediation activity.
The delegation of procurement activities to Unitec allows the relationships established with its suppliers to be maintained stable, since the choice of suppliers continues to be the sole responsibility of the customer. Only the management of the procurement processes is therefore outsourced, up to the payment of the invoices.
The company has continued, and continues, to develop advanced concepts and services for companies (including public ones) among which it is possible to mention the "Virtual Warehouse" with some of its specializations:
- Virtual Hospital Warehouse (for a healthcare district)
- Virtual Refrigerated Warehouse (for an agricultural and food district)
The Virtual Warehouse
Unitec offers advanced solutions for logistics and procurement (elogistic - eprocurement), proposing itself as an integrator based on Information Technology. Client companies also have the opportunity to take advantage of services and tools that allow them to optimize supplies and warehouses.
The Virtual Warehouse in fact represents a possibility for optimizing the management of supplies and "replenishments".
This solution has been designed above all for all those companies or entities that are part of one or more industrial districts or constitute links in a value chain.
The new information and communication technologies offer the possibility of sharing information, goods and services.
An example is that of the management of company supplies, where a specialist and neutral operator with respect to all the companies in the district, which therefore ensures and guarantees transparency for all participants in the project, UNITEC in fact, creates a virtual warehouse made up of the sum of the individual company warehouses and centrally provides the reordering activities for the requested items.
The conditions for implementation are:
- a logistics and communication standard
- a relative geographical proximity of the client companies (radius of 50 km)
The supplies of each company participating in the project immediately decrease but, paradoxically, availability increases. The transformation of a "physical" object into a "virtual" one is achieved by combining the "possession of an asset" with the possibility of "access to an asset".
The Virtual Warehouse is in fact an expression of the use that can be made of these possible transformations. Both the physical state of objects and their virtual state are considered within the M.V., for which we can define it as a physical-IT hybrid. The sharing of information therefore allows us to rationalize and outsource the management of supplies, physically present in the company warehouses.
Through the M.V., in fact, supplies are represented by the sum of the components made available by the companies participating in the same M.V. and operating 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 industrial spare parts.
With the M.V., all the companies in the district are offered a reduction in the supplies to be stored, without however having to give up their ready availability in case of need, and this thanks to a management, logistics and IT system that allows for the real-time control of all the information necessary for the coordinated and total management of the use of the supplies themselves. In case of use of supplies by a company, beyond the limits of its availability, Unitec, through the IT system, immediately takes steps to collect the goods from the warehouse of a company belonging to the same (or neighboring) district, and reorder the same goods from the supplier.
The entire district therefore functions as a single factory where the M.V. it is physically made up of the warehouses owned by the various companies, the management of which 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 according to the availability of the M.V. and its operational needs. Participants can then request delivery of the materials they need online, 24 hours a day.
With the M.V., therefore, the management of supplies is standardized and obsolescence is recycled, thus allowing an increase in warehouse rotation and the availability of goods, previously linked to the existence of traditional management. The companies interconnected in this system also have the guarantee of an availability of materials that goes well beyond that previously possessed, as the supplies are not present in their warehouse.
Obviously, the more companies participate in the implementation of these solutions, the lower the quotas of materials to be stored, and at the same time, the greater the quotas of materials available.
