Deliveries are announced to the system in advance by the forwarding agent over the Internet. Taking all other announced deliveries into account, the system calculates the optimum time for the shortest possible lead time and advises the forwarding agent of this as the target arrival.

The capacity restrictions for this intelligent forward planning are entered in the master data. One result of this planning is a more uniform distribution of the trucks and thus the workload at the control centre and loading points over the day. Furthermore, closed loading points or possible conflicts with the opening times of the booked loading points are shown at the time of posting so that the forwarding agent can then react interactively.

Scheduling interface for the truck control centre

Advised or unannounced deliveries are checked for the plausibility and corrected here. SyncroSupply thus receives the relevant material data via an interface to the materials management system so that it can guide the truck to the relevant target loading points according to the configuration in the master data and plan its correct duration there.

To this end, the employees in the control centre can always see which and how many trucks have been advised, are being processed or have been finished. Furthermore, the exact status, position and progress can be determined for all trucks in the plant. Thanks to the automatic update of the clients, virtually in real-time, this means maximum transparency for the user. The time needed for a control centre employee to solve a sudden conflict situation is thus reduced to a minimum.

Intranet user interface at the loading points

Employees at the loading points have access to a greatly simplified web application in terms of scope and complexity so that they can confirm the main actions such as arrival of the truck, start of loading, end of loading.

They can also access the basic information on the truck and save events such as „No material available for loading point“. Access is hereby limited to the loading points and possibly preliminary buffer zones of the employee. The deliveries are also filtered and shown according to the scheduled loading points. The individual, personalised assignment of rights is, however, a part of the master database.

Communication with the truck drivers

The best possible realtime and flexible communication with truck drivers is indispensable to allow a reaction to situations that were not foreseeable at the time the truck was being processed in the control centre.

Solutions with a variety of different types of terminal devices have already been implemented in SyncroSupply. These include:

• bidirectional communication per Smartphone in various languages, can also be combined with GPS
• bidirectional communication per DECT phone
• unidirectional communication per pager
• automatic location of the position per GPS and GPRS with follow-up action

RFID for automatic arrival detection at the loading point and to control access via the factory gate

Statistical processing of the historicised data

SyncroSupply already has a simple analysis tool to receive and analyse basic information on finished deliveries.

The data can also be exported as an Excel table or .csv file with one mouse click.

If the customer has a data warehouse with a connected system for data analysis and display (Business Objects, SQL server, MS Access etc.), SyncroSupply can offer an automatic data export to the customer system. SyncroSupply provides all of the information on supplies and the customer is able to perform his analyses in a familiar environment. This ensures the comparability with earlier reports.