The customer

The MOSOLF Group operates internationally and handles around 2.5 million vehicles a year, carrying out technical work on some 700,000 of them. It includes such companies as FTÜ Fahrzeugtransport and Übernahme GmbH in Kippenheim, Germany. Up to 30,000 vehicles may be stored at this site over an area of 900,000 sq. m whilst they wait to be prepared for use, fitted with special equipment or transported to another location. As well as its site in Kippenheim, the MOSOLF Group also operates a further 24 technical and logistics centres with a transport fleet of 850 heavy-goods vehicles and 300 double-decker coaches.

Practical experiences

Steffen Job, Commercial Manager of FTÜ explains: "The increased efficiency in our intra-company transport network has considerably improved the cost-effectiveness of our services. In addition to rapid payback, an investment in state-of-the-art IT systems promised improved quality in logistics, as the movements of all our vehicles are registered online and in real time".
Michael Kaiser, Management Assistant at FTÜ: "Although the number of vehicle movements has now risen from six to ten per hour, our employees are happier".

The use

With the growing numbers of vehicles handled and the extension of the parking areas in Kippenheim, it became clear that personnel costs for storing vehicles, transferring them and taking them out of storage were increasing disproportionately and that the costs of intra-company transport were reducing the company's revenue accordingly. The company quickly identified that the problem was being caused by the conventional way it organised deployment of its driving service staff, using a system of paper documents that was linked to a lack of flexibility and the unavoidable expenses of booking and making amendments. Intra-company transport orders for its driving service were printed centrally and distributed via the drivers of seven shuttle buses to around 70 employees of the driving service. The main problem of this process was the rigid order sequence and large proportion of time employees had to spend waiting between individual transport orders, often up to 15 minutes, so that they could be taken by shuttle bus to their next location. Unproductive downtime of up to 40% was common. It was at this time that the MosMobil solution was implemented. As well as route optimisation, which leads to a dramatic reduction in downtime, the system also encompasses the goods-receiving process. Using this process, the vehicles are initially identified using barcodes. Information can then be input manually, for example regarding the mileage, or transport damage can be documented using the camera integrated into the CASIO terminal.
As the system offers rapid payback and a considerable improvement in provision of information using online communication and real-time data processing, the MOSOLF Group has been quick to equip more of its technical and logistics centres with MosMobil. Kippenheim was followed by the FTÜ site in Germersheim. To ensure the availability of an independent data network at the external premises in Germersheim, a GPRS/UMTS communications network was chosen over WLAN. Further MOSOLF Group sites are set to follow suit.