January this year, Container Centralen (CC) introduced RFID on all CC Containers in Europe – the standard trolley for transportation of pot plants. This was to protect the system against fraud, to reduce cost, lower prices, and to make way for even more efficient logistics in the horticultural industry. As a natural next step, CC now optimise their organisation by gathering central competences and resources in Hoofddorp, the Netherlands, to ensure the highest possible efficiency and continued low prices.
January this year, Container Centralen (CC) introduced RFID on all CC Containers in Europe – the standard trolley for transportation of pot plants. This was to protect the system against fraud, to reduce cost, lower prices, and to make way for even more efficient logistics in the horticultural industry. As a natural next step, CC now optimise their organisation by gathering central competences and resources in Hoofddorp, the Netherlands, to ensure the highest possible efficiency and continued low prices.
With the peak season in the horticultural industry now behind us, the use and administration of CC Containers with RFID is becoming more and more a natural part of the daily operations in the industry. An increasing number of users now use the RFID technology actively in their businesses to optimise their logistics and order management processes.
Optimising Internal Processes
However, CC do not just look at the operational processes in the markets to find possible savings and optimisation for the industry; they have also been looking into their own internal operations and working procedures over the past years to find ways of working smarter.
– ‘We are happy to see that the implementation of RFID, with huge support from the industry, now is a fact’ says CEO of CC, Tonny Vangsgaard Gravesen, and he continues, – ‘But in a competitive business world, we cannot allow ourselves to lean back and relax. We must always be on the move by improving and developing our products and services, our company, and not least ourselves.’
As a result of the internal investigations and evaluation, several processes and services from CC are now being ‘fine tuned’ and streamlined to offer customers all over Europe a uniform service. To reinforce this optimisation of processes and services, and thus also improve cost-efficiency, a lot of key resources are now located at CC’s office in Hoofddorp in the Netherlands from June 1. The sales support staff, most of the logistics functions, as well as customer-related financial tasks will therefore be found in Hoofddorp. Of course all sales supporters are native to the country that they are servicing, so the customers will still be serviced in their own language.
More Customer Focus in a Lean Organisation
With the new setup in CC, the local key account managers, who of course still operate directly in the local markets, will have more time to focus on direct customer contact instead of management and administrative tasks as today. This means that they will be ‘on the road’ much more.
– ‘In a globalised world with highly international customers, it is important that our customers get a uniform service and experience with CC no matter where in Europe they meet us,’ Tonny Vangsgaard Gravesen says. – ‘The local offices have been important cornerstones while we were building up the pool of now almost 4 million CC Containers over the last 15-20 years. However, as activities have increased and technology advanced, we can now operate more efficiently by gathering resources in one central place. The disadvantages of having several small offices are that we cannot optimise operational efficiency further. Therefore, this change in our organisation, called ‘Fit For Future’, will be another step towards increased efficiency through a lean organisation, and consequently a way for us to keep costs and prices down’ Tonny Vangsgaard Gravesen concludes.
More information:
www.container-centralen.com
