At the Board Dialogue 2017 in Hamburg on April 6, Dr. Lothar Thoma, the CEO of M&M Militzer & Münch International Holding AG, gave a speech on “Global Supply Chain Partnerships”. The speech discussed how a control tower can contribute to a logistics company mastering today’s economic challenges and offering customers a transparent supply chain.
Globalization and the staking out of free trade zones, digitalization and industry 4.0, political and economic eruptions and upheavals – how to seize opportunities in this world that increasingly becomes more complex? Especially from logistics, supply chain management across all borders into the most remote regions of the world is expected. And even here, customers want to check per mouse click at any time where the goods they have ordered are at the moment.
Showing the transport chain
Militzer & Münch guarantees end-to-end supply chain management to the remotest areas – also without being able to rely on the usual IT structures. With big-dimensioned projects or challenging transports, Militzer & Münch places so-called control towers at the customer’s disposal. These control towers consist of a team of experts where all threads are drawn together for superordinate coordination and planning. Via email and phone, the employees are in intensive contact with the carriers, and enter the data in a data bank. Thus, the entire transport chain is transparently traceable for the customer.
Control tower for a Kazakhstan project
Using the example of the transport of a complete production line for a float glass factory to Kazakhstan, it is easy to demonstrate how the strengths within an organization can be bundled. All in all the entire Militzer & Münch door-to-door project took ten months. Transports from three continents and eleven countries had to be organized. Each shipment had to be exactly synchronized with the customer’s assembly schedule. The freight comprised 8,000 tons of fire resistant material, plus 700 additional container loads of equipment. The multi-modal transport of the containers via vessel, train and truck took between 14 and 30 days depending on place of origin and transport mode.
Chances offered by the New Silk Road
The combination of control tower and strategic partnerships is also important in relation to the New Silk Road. The Chinese government invests several hundred billion US dollars in the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) to boost the revitalization of the trade lanes around the old Silk Road. In the Central Asian neighboring countries, numerous infrastructure projects can be expected, and with them great potential for logistics companies to optimally handle far-reaching projects with intelligent supply chain management.