Consolidation
Goods flows tailored to your needs
Thanks to buyer’s consolidation and our gateway service, we deliver shipments by sea directly inland to Germany and Europe without transshipment at the port of arrival. In this process, we rely on our broad network of approximately 190 locations worldwide.
From our offices, we analyze the location of our customers’ suppliers and coordinate the associated shipments in the main and onward legs for a customized buyer’s consolidation concept. Together with our customers, we find the ideal consolidation points, maximize the use of cargo volumes, and offer customized solutions to optimize the shipping process.
On the busiest routes in LCL gateway service between Asia and the Indian subcontinent to Europe, we take advantage of several ship departures per week. Taking loading guidelines and the timing of departures into account, we intelligently link buyer’s consol containers with our LCL gateway containers for our customers, thus providing a delivery service precisely tailored to their needs.
In addition to our employees’ operational expertise, homogeneous processes, and our transport management system (TMS) ensure that quality is consistently high throughout the supply chain. We coordinate the direct delivery of our containers all the way inland to avoid cargo handling at the port of arrival and ensure that goods flow efficiently.
By combining our own customer containers with our LCL gateway network, we are able to provide at least one weekly departure for any surpluses that arise. These are either additionally fed into our gateway network or temporarily stored to ensure proper utilization of the next consolidated container’s capacity. This works within Asia on the routes to and from Oceania just as it does from Europe to North and South America or vice versa. In this way, we ensure that our customers can plan with reliability and have the flexibility they need in their supply chain.
In order to respond with flexibility to changing schedules, consolidated goods can be expedited – for example via our Sea-Air, China Rail, or even China Truck services. We also offer other additional services, such as quality controls at the warehouse, loading containers according to type or article, marking and labeling, splitting orders according to receiving addresses, or neutralizing shipments and delivering them directly to end customers.
Our clients benefit from improved container utilization and reduced delivery frequency at their warehouse. The order status can be tracked at any time via our online tracking system and checked down to the item or PO level. Messages from our TMS are supplemented via a variety of interfaces, including to INTTRA, Infor NEXUS, the shipping companies, and the port terminals, among others. This comprehensive automatic monitoring is regularly complemented by separate checks performed by our Central Coordination Desk and compared with the current information provided by the shipping companies and the shipping schedules. In this way, our customers receive reliable feedback on shipment data, order and shipment status, quantities, weights, volumes, and the shipping documents on file.