CBIC HELPED US FIND THE RIGHT PARTNER, SAYS REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF EUROPEAN LOGISTICS COMPANY

With more that 7,000 employees, 150 offices, and annual turnover of EUR 1.67 billion in 2018, Gebrüder Weiss is one of the leading transportation and logistics companies in Europe. Its regional director, Karel Šindelář, approached CBIC last year with a specific need and a request for assistance with finding a suitable research partner that would be able to innovate the reporting function of a distribution system of Gebrüder Weiss’ branch in Jeneč, Central Bohemia. The collaboration resulted in the implementation of a new IT tool that is currently being tested live.

“We noticed Gebrüder Weiss back in June 2018 during the Innovation Potential Tracking project among Central Bohemian businesses. The project revealed its potential interest in our services, so we got in touch personally,” says Pavel Jovanovič, business development manager, CBIC. “Shortly afterwards, we received two specific requests – the company needed to modernize its internal IT system to be able to track the structure and origin of consignments in the distribution system in real time and to know capacity demand in advance, ideally a month and a week ahead,” Pavel Jovanovič explains the task for a research partner.

The CBIC manager wrote to more than ten universities and institutes that possessed relevant expertise to solve the innovation task for the Central Bohemian company. The best match was the Department of Logistics and Management of Transport, Faculty of Transportation Sciences, Czech Technical University in Prague (FTS CTU). The FTS CTU team was joined by Michal Douda, an expert from the Technical University of Ostrava. His task was to create a system that would allow Gebrüder Weiss to display a list of customers in real time including the number of their consignments, deviation from the long-term average, and their share of the delivery capacity. “We need the information to capture short-term and immediate fluctuations in the volume of orders and to establish the cause of such trend. We can also predict development in the following days with greater accuracy,“ says Karel Šindelář.

The system was supposed to be built upon a comprehensive consignment database, its queries and reports. Ideally, everything would work “at a single click of the mouse”. Implementation of the system took place in two stages – an analysis of the current status and recommendation of next steps, and implementation of the IT system and relevant changes in the organization.

“The Central Bohemian Innovation Center saved us a lot of time and effort finding the right partner for our problem. I can only recommend its services. The new IT tool is in the running-in stage and has been working flawlessly so far. We are simultaneously testing a similar system in one of our Gebrüder Weiss branches in Austria. We will eventually choose the faster of the two, which will fit our needs better,” explains Karel Šindelář.

For more details about CBIC services, please visit www.s-ic.cz or write to Pavel Jovanovič at