ABX Logistics & Berry Floor
Berry Floor – ABX Logistics
Berry Floor, a producer and seller of laminate floors with a worldwide customer base, outsourced its distribution activities to ABX Logistics.
ABX Logistics is a fast growing logistics service provider, offering its operational expertise to the industry. ABX will design, develop, implement and support the logistics operations of their customers.
For the definition of the solution and practical implementation of the Berry Floor operation, Innochain was selected to manage the complete process.
Our understanding of both the industry and logistics service providers and our ability to act as a bridge between the two worlds, was a key element in our selection. Furthermore, our proven project, implementation and change management methodology and our past experience with complete integration projects were seen as another important element.
The assignment commenced in december 2007 with the high level planning and budgeting (7 digit number) of the entire project. Our first joint step was designing the full set of business processes (planning, execution and exception processes) that were needed to support the future model.
Based on this mutually approved process hand-book the different work-streams were planned and started.
Physical work-stream: Newly install building, material handling equipment, racking and conveyors, cabling, electricity, networks, RF equipment, external networks, etc.
IT work-stream: Configure the WMS application in line with the process handbook, develop interfaces, set up the hosting infrastructure, etc.
Organisational work-stream: Set-up the organisation in line with the process hand-book and volume data. Prepare user readiness training documentation and exercises, working instructions and procedures – support user acceptancy testing, support training, support go-live, etc.
Transitional Phase: Making sure that the existing model can be transferred smoothly to the newly implemented solution, whilst ensuring business continuity.
Innochain takes on the overall program management, the implementation management of all work-streams and managed the change (organisational readiness) in this entire program. Within this, we manage a project team of 10 people (ABX, innochain and external) at the ABX site and we are the prime contact to Berry Floor for the program.
The new model will go in full operation as of August 2008. It will offer Berry Floor a number of clear benefits due to the state of the art solution a considerable cost and service benefit can be achieved. For ABX it will be a further expansion of it’s customer base in Benelux with a show case that can attract similar business in the region.