An international brand - an electronics manufacturer from Germany - announced in 2018 a tender to address its situation with insufficient logistics capacity in the central warehouse.

The company looked at this decision strategically. It received offers from dozens of logistics companies from Germany and Europe. FHB succeeded in the first and second rounds and after demanding more than a year of IT and process integration we started shipping orders in 2019.

However, the whole case study deserves more text because of the uniqueness of integrated processes where we solve online connection of all steps in logistics.

Brand, our customer, has a portfolio of about 1000 products of home and consumer electronics. In principle apart from white technology it covers almost everything you can think of. Its electronics are custom-made by more than 20 suppliers, Asia, America, Russia and Europe.

The Kika information system that we use at FHB is connected to the customer via API. The whole process begins with the creation of a receipt by the customer which is a copy of its delivery note of the shipped goods from the manufacturer whether in a container or pallet quantity.

Upon arrival at the FHB warehouse the random inspection process is activated according to the type of SKU we have agreed on how many thousands of products we will professionally unpack, connect to electricity, etc. We will test the complete functionality of the product. Only after this test, which is performed by a trained electrician, we release the entire delivered batch of goods to the warehouse. If the product fails, a multiple check is performed according to the protocol, and if another failed piece is confirmed, the communication with the manufacturer is taken over by the headquarters in Germany and the product is still waiting until the decision of their R&D department.

After stocking up, the ERP system notifies the customer to our system how many pieces of goods go to B2B storage on pallets, how many pieces we have to stock up for our operative box storage in mezzanines, ready for B2C dispatch. This data is managed dynamically, according to the utilization of the warehouse in Germany and the following deliveries of manufacturers and orders of B2B partners.

As FHB currently provides a full-fledged second location of the company within the EU, we have a complete range of the brand in stock and, if necessary, we can also supply B2B partners - stores and shops throughout Western Europe. However, our warehouse is primarily used for orders in the CEE region - geographically close to Slovakia.

But what is interesting about the process, is the calculation of warehouse capacity in real time and the countdown of time for delivery to the customer, for ecommerce B2C orders. Simply put, especially during the Christmas season, our ERP and WMS exchange free capacity information - they dynamically route new orders from their e-shops so that they are all shipped that day - even according to cut off times to individual countries. It usually happens that we ship early German orders from Slovakia - delivery is D + 1 in Germany as well as at the local warehouse, which frees up the daily German warehouse's daily work capacity to supply B2B stores.

As you can see, logistics today is tailor-made - but such partnerships are then really long-term and beneficial for both parties. Win - win.