Changing the world for better... at least the world of gas stations)

Tag: 4PL logistics

Cloud-Based Solutions in Logistics

My expert comments given to LogLerney portal appeared to be the fundamental issue for this article. I do consider cloud-based technologies have a huge potential for the entire field of logistics.

Cloud-based solutions and backup have proved to be a better alternative to traditional options. A growing number of applications and management software lets businesses reduce the costs and concentrate on some prior issues and targets. What is the idea of such advanced supply chain managing tools and how can they be implemented in logistics?

Costa Coffee: supply chain as a growth factor

When traditional logistic models and the organization of the supply chain have jeopardized the dynamic growth of the company, the owners of Costa Coffee went all-in. The company completely changed the leadership, adopted a new strategy for the organization of supply, hired a new logistics operator, and also introduced a new enterprise software to provide a new level of benefit from the telemetry component of its system. We believe that the final result speaks for itself.

Author’s note
When I was preparing this article, i was surprised by how similar problems had to be solved in RusHOLTS around the same time. An illustration of the similarity could be invention of the rad by Marconi and Popov. The problem is in the air and solution comes to those who are looking for it. Only RusHOLTS had to be tis own “new” logistics operator because of the lack of worthy proposals. No “regional partners”, no services outsourcing – only our own trained and well-managed structures that guarantee the high quality of work.

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IT is an indispensable tool in the supply chain management

You get nowhere without IT. Information technologies are so closely intertwined with all the business processes of transportation and logistics companies, that even coffee machines monitoring is implemented as an remote solution. Here’s an interview with CEO of RusHOLTS Alexander Kuzmin for the magazine “Technologies and means of communication”, # 1, 2016.

– What the trends in the field of IT and telecommunications are priority for your organization?

– Logistics companies of 4PL level are engaged in supply chain management, they become part of the business processes of partners with whom they work. We organize the supply chain of gas station chains in all aspects that relate to the non-fuel business. Simply put, we supply all the necessary from the goods for sale, supplies, furniture, coffee machines to IT-solutions that automate processes of gas station’s daily operations. Gas stations chains as a retail object have a lot of features. Each store by itself is small, but the scale of the chain may be hundreds or even thousands of stations. The total number of chain’s cafe and store items is about 3000 SKU (items’ ID), the station may make an order starting from 500 rubles worth. And everybody can imagine Russian distances very well. The organization and supply chain management in these conditions are a heavy task requiring a lot of masterhood which is impossible without IT.

Private label goods – a trend in demand by gas stations chains

How we started to work with the products under the brand name of our private label, how we were developing this direction and what conclusions we’ve drawn. >>

This material includes, perhaps, a one fifth part of the story, so the full version is available to read in the blog.

We’re thanking the magazine “Trick of the trade”, which gave the opportunity to speak out on the important subject for us. Because the private label goods for hypermarkets and private label goods at the gas stations require a different technology to be applied, pursue different goals and objectives, have different pricing and so on and so forth. We’ve said it and we will repeat it for 100-500 times. Those who have already realized this, please, do not be offended.

In terms of shopping malls business, RusHOLTS is now among the five largest suppliers of automotive products for the relevant departments of the federal hypermarket chains. We started off developing our business in the 90s by supplying chemicals and auto cosmetics. In the Russian market we were the official representatives of world’s two huge brands – Holts and Redex. At that time in our country there was no hypermarket chains and gas stations chains have only been planned to start manage its shops on a unified and centralized basis. Then there was 1998 defaulted payments crisis.

The people stopped buying expensive imported car cosmetics, but no one refused from the use of the cars and their quantity only grew. Then we decided to create our own full-scale range of chemicals and auto cosmetics from fluids and fuel additives to polishes and air fresheners. So that niche of autochemistry saw import substitution by Russian-made goods as early as in 1998. Many well-known brands in this direction became the history since that time. Products created by us were unified under the umbrella brand EXPERT.

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