E-commerce is constantly growing locally. And this is confirmed by the data from the three-day Hot Sale, with a significant increase in users who bought online. More than one million average users per day, strengthened the use of digital media to shop over the economic crisis. But what about behind the scenes, what about a product from the click that confirms the purchase until it reaches the consumer’s hands.
Referring to the back room of e-commerce we speak of logistics. “Logistics is like an orchestra, we can all have an instrument, but making it work well is the challenge. Maybe it’s easy to have 1,000 trucks, have 250 branches, but the challenge here is to coordinate them well so that a shipment arrives in 24 hours. The magic has to happen here.” Alejandro Rinaldi, IT Director of Andreani, said casually in a meeting with journalists at the Benavídez Intelligent Transfer Center, one of the operational bases capable of processing about 8,000 parcels per hour and carrying out 5 million shipments in a month.
The meeting is not accidental. It’s Wednesday morning, it’s the third and last day of Hot Sale 2023, one of the most anticipated business events of the year. The shed explodes with parcels, Andreani has 2,500 client companies plus hundreds of SMEs, who enter as quickly as they leave (they can’t stay more than four hours in that place). From there they are distributed in trucks (they have 3,600 for distribution) which will take them to the corresponding branch in every point of the country and then the consumer picks it up there or receives it at home.
“Now you’re behind the scenes, hot sale is happening and from here we pull the strings so that everything goes well”underlines Rinaldi, adding: “This is the Transfer Center where the logistics take place. And logistics is basically the activity of generating goods in a decentralized way, consolidating them and decentralizing them again”.
Entering the 16,000 square meter rectangle that the company has in Benavidez is almost like diving into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory: everything that happens there generates amazement. There’s no music in that shed, though if you stop to look at the full picture, everything goes in rhythm. The machinery works like a real Swiss watch (even if the equipment is of Dutch origin): land rails that move trolleys – with pallets full of products – automatically and trolleys driven by an operator with driver that perform the same function. The vertical sorter (automatic parcel sorter) located on a raised floor has a processing 8,000 parcels per hour, which scans and classifies the 92% of the 90,000 parcels that pass through that center daily.
But that orchestra to which Rinaldi alluded at the beginning can work from a logistical point of view thanks to Technology which also helps to coordinate the interaction between many players, to speed up processes and also to reduce the margins of error, because while all this is happening in Now , there is a consumer eager to find his object of desire. “New technologies are implemented behind every shipment to continue to improve the experience of our customers and recipients, that require more and more information and immediacy”, explains the IT Director.
NS
Source: Clarin
