Compound Logistics Hödlmayr (CLS)

Optimization system for vehicle transfer processes on the basis of a location-based software framework at Austria’s largest vehicle logistics company, Hödlmayr International. Hödlmayr International has given us the chance to extend our research results in the area of mobile engineering to a process optimization system in the logistics domain, where innovative concepts were required to accelerate existing suboptimal processes and to reduce unproductive standard tasks by automated routines. Hödlmayr International is a vehicle transportation company with 15 sites in 13 European countries. Its business is to store and transfer vehicles from the manufacturers to the retailers. Hereby, the speed of the transfer process is crucial for the company’s revenue. Hödlmayr’s site in Austria stores approx. 10.000 vehicles and has about 1.000 daily vehicle movements. The initial vehicle transfer process was inefficient: Triggered by production- and planning data of both arriving vehicles and orders from retailers, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system calculated a daily schedule of transfer tasks per person in advance for a whole day (and was therefore inflexible to dynamic changes). Several small busses each carried 3 to 4 crew members to different storage places on the compound where vehicles had to be released from storage and then waited for the crew to finish their tasks. The process was analog for placing vehicles in storage (strictly organized by brands). It needed explicit busses and bus drivers (i.e., additional personal and technical resources), encountering waiting times and empty mileage for the crew when carried to the vehicles or back.