Legallais

Legallais, the no. 1 distributor of hardware products to professionals chose LM Transport Order Optimizer by a-SIS to manage the functions of carrier allocation and invoicing as a complement to the WMS LM7^®.

Context

Legallais distributes industrial hardware products all over France for construction professionals, industrial maintenance, administrations and local communities from a central stock supplying its customers as well as 8 agencies.
In 2002 Legallais launched a consultation for 11 WMS editors to equip its new warehouse in Saint-André-Sur-Orne (Normandy). a-SIS was chosen for the management of that new platform of 16 000 m2 with more than 25 000 product references.

Specificities

An extremely heterogeneous product catalogue
The challenge for the application was the management of products of different sizes: small screws stored in boxes, large items stored on pallets or on the ground, or very long products stored in aisles. All these references are available from stock and may be delivered quickly all over France. Each order transferred to the warehouse management before 3 pm must be shipped the same day before 7 pm.
Many specific flow parameters must be considered in that warehouse: some products are on ICPE nomenclature and must be controlled on volume. Other products need the management of expiry dates, or the listing with the numbers of the shipped batches.

Mechanised equipment and tray management

The warehouse is equipped with a CIUCH conveyor used for goods-in, storage, and picking. Specific feature at Legallais : the recipients are mainly boxes even for the storage. The pallets are only used for very long products such as ladders.

Solutions for the transport activity

The problem : high distribution capillarity

Everyday, the warehouse receives 120 supplier orders with 600 lines. This represents about 2000 orders to be delivered within 48 hours all over France.
The main transport problem is the distance to the customers in relation to the areas of economic activity and the main traffic routes. So it is necessary to manage different logistic providers specialized in parcel service to bze delivered within 48 hours.

The choice of LM Transport Order Optimizer
As the carrier is chosen by the warehouse management depending on the type of order and the specific data of the ordered products, Legallais decided to invest in LM Transport Order Optimizer from a-SIS in addition to the WMS LM7®.
LM Trasnport Order Optimizer ensures the automatic choice of carrier considering their tariffs as well as the associated constraints of service which also allows the simulation of financial consequences of new tariffs.

Advantages
With LM Transport Order Optimizer, the transport costs for the dispatch orders are automatically calculated based on real dispatch data and depending on the geographic organization.
The advantage of choosing two complementary software packages from the same company is that the TMS uses the WMS database to manage dispatches and pre-invoicing.

Since the installation of the a-SIS solutions, Legallais manages the largest catalogue of industrial hardware products on the market, and so ensures its customers fast and reliable availability and the product delivery.