SCA Transforest
SCA Transforest meets the transportation needs of SCA Forest Products, a business area within SCA Group which produces high quality publication papers for newspapers, magazines and catalogues, pulp, solid-wood products and forest based biofuels. With a highly developed European distribution network in place, SCA Transforest saw the potential to expand the business and solve transportation and logistics tasks for companies outside the SCA Group as well.

The Challenge
Winning more business posed certain IT challenges - their warehouse and distribution systems lacked the flexibility and visibility needed to successfully meet the requirements of various new customers. For many years, warehouse and distribution processes were managed from custom-designed, home-grown warehouse management systems specifically built to support forest products. These systems were not flexible enough to process different types of goods while taking individual customer requirements into concern. Each terminal system worked individually and offered no visibility across the organization, making it difficult for logistics managers to make well-informed decisions.

Therefore it became clear to SCA Transforest that with their ambition to successfully attract new customers, it was critical they invest in a functionally rich best-of-breed warehouse management system.

Collaborative Implementation
Together, SCA Transforest and the solution provider developed a system template that would cover the complexity of each of the terminals and could be applied for each implementation, thus ensuring the system could be rolled out to new sites in a quick and cost effective manner.

Of nine sites, the first to go-live was the largest – the 75,000 m2 warehouse in Umeå, Sweden which successfully went live on time in March 2007. Three other terminals went live the following year, including the highly complex Rotterdam, Netherlands site. Combined, these four main terminals manage approximately 6.7 million tons of goods annually.

Several enhancements were made after each of the first three go-lives, making the following go-live smoother. Thomas Granberg explains, “Internally we all feared the Rotterdam implementation. It was our most complex site and everyone kept telling me that the problems would come when we implemented in Rotterdam. However because of the enhancements and experiences learned from the first three go-lives, the Rotterdam implementation was in fact the smoothest of them all.” SCA Transforest has continued the roll-out process to the remaining sites across Europe.

The Results
SCA Transforest has benefited from lower distribution costs and streamlined warehouse processes. More importantly, the company is now serving numerous forestry product customers and can offer logistics services to other industries, something that was impossible with the old warehouse management system which supported forest products only. “More and more companies are now discovering the benefits of working with us,” concludes Granberg. “Clients can now track their goods all the way from mill to end customer. We have achieved the goals we set.”