Building upon secure stock

Julius Berger Nigeria builds upon inconsoWMS X

Julius Berger Nigeria PLC (JBN) distinguishes itself in the developing country through high standards in construction, work safety as well as maintenance of the fleet and construction machinery. Also in the logistics, a multitude of requirements not to be underestimated are mastered. Recently, inconsoWMS X has been a significant help. Along with the pure logistics functions such as inventory management, goods receiving and goods issuing, integral parts of the system for JBN are also enterprise resource planning components such as master data maintenance and customer order entry.

Nigeria works more than ever to reduce the gap to the emerging economies since the reestablishment of democratic conditions 10 years ago. The boom is accompanied by intensive construction and the largest construction company, and even the largest private employer in the country, is JBN. The 49% of the company belongs to Bilfinger Berger group and the approximately 18,000 employees contain 750 German and other European expatriates.

//// No curtailment with proper accounting

Nigeria is two and a half times the size of Germany and construction is taking place in all corners of this large country. JBN operates nationally ca. 100 warehouses including large import and regional warehouses and supply stations for a number of construction sites. Along with a modern fleet with ca. 1,700 autos and pickups, 1,320 trucks, 106 ships and barges, 870 earth moving equipment, 105 mobile cranes, 2 airplanes and 415 electricity generators, there are 370,000 articles recorded that have to be stock managed and moved. As even in Nigeria, all the regulations of a formal accounting are valid. JBN makes no difference in exactness and transparency. However, this task is not always easy in a developing country such as Nigeria. Development, implementation and operations of a logistic system with all its modernity and efficiency in material and management are still operated differently than in an industrial country.

Three challenges should be mentioned: the information and communication infrastructure of the country, the specifics for the accounting processes and dialog guidance resulting from this infrastructure and the political-bureaucratic conditions.

//// Online yes, but how long?

Actually, for all IT activities in Nigeria, it can be assumed: online connections are possible, but they are prone to disruptions. Time and time again, they break down or are disrupted for a timespan. A purely central solution would be doomed to fail from the beginning. This is why JBN operates both a central server in Abuja and ten regionally distributed independent warehouse management servers that take care of a number of local warehouses. Automatic booking such as is normal here in Germany must be executed manually for the most part in Nigeria. Each individual warehouse booking must be manually completed in a dialog. For JBN, the inconso team developed a special booking module and a refined user interface. It had to be set up so that the booking requirements and contents were exactly represented, but at the same time having a highly error-tolerant user and dialog process. The IWF front-end of inconsoWMS X with its graphical interface proved to be the appropriate platform. As a precaution, the most important operative dialogs can also be operated purely through the keyboard meaning not just with the mouse. In addition, control steps were built in to hinder error bookings as much as possible.

//// Asynchronous is the trump card

The decentralized operation also brings another challenge with it: Each of the bookings can be maintained on the local server. But only when the connection to the central server is made, stock, master data changes and orders can be transmitted and synchronizations completed. For this, resilient interfaces for asynchronous bookings and comparison processes had to be programmed. Since the article master data must also be created in the local instances, it can happen that the same article exists in different local serves under different names. For this problem, only a specific comparison process developed by inconso on the central server helps to automatically detect such constellations.

//// Difficulty results in creativity

Since many replacement parts, raw materials and operations material cannot be obtained on the local market, they must be imported. This is challenged by a strongly developed bureaucracy with sometimes far-reaching import hindrances. As the transport times of the goods imported from Asia and Europe are also considerable, the supply of construction sites with materials is also a substantial challenge. Many things are produced on-site: Julius Berger operates its own quarry, mixes its own cement, pours cement elements, carpenters its own furniture for the offices, and produces even motors and renewed tires in its own workshops.

//// Overstocks efficiently used

Above all, it is important to build up of supply stock with the appropriate ranges on the one hand and on the other hand to efficiently use these stocks due to the significant procurement times. Overstocks are pulled off of individual construction sites and stores and brought to the locations where they are actually needed. The supplies must be sufficient on a country-wide level for about four months of operations. They were monitored only “organizationally” previously since the diversity of the different cases were not set up in the old system. The newly developed processes based on inconsoWMS resulted in a noticeable facilitation of the procurement and stock management. With the system, the order suggestions were generated considering the country-wide supplies and the material call-ups for the undersupplied locations created automatically. The orders from local warehouses that were not covered by reallocations were then sent to the central server. Finally, the orders were forwarded to the central procurement of the company in Wiesbaden who then made the purchases worldwide and concentrated the deliveries that then were to be made to Nigeria.

Several times a day, a country-wide data update was made as soon as the online connection was established. This way, all the stock data on all the local servers was distributed and each local warehouse had cross-location stock transparency. Of course, it is decisive that these updates take place as quickly and securely as possible. For this, there was also significant programming efforts to be done so that only the changes were transmitted and the data transfer volume kept as low as possible. The same was valid for the distribution of the system. All the system and database updates had to take place at the same time to all systems country-wide if possible. New software releases are completed from the inconso headquarters in Bad Nauheim, Germany.

//// Quick realization – large efficiency advantages

The entire project for developing and implementation took only ten months. Here, it was proven that inconsoWMS could be built as a standard system and simultaneously be flexibly fit to even the different conditions in a developing country like Nigeria. The implementation was done seamlessly with a Big Bang in January 2011. JBN could do away with a large portion of the previous paperwork, realized a significant efficiency increase and can complete its contribution to the boom of the country with even more effort.