GEODIS in Italy awarded "2016 Logistics of the Year"

The Contract Logistics Line of Business of GEODIS in Italy has been awarded for an innovative environmental sustainability project.

GEODIS received “The Logistics of the Year” award for the project “Let’s save the paper, let’s save the planet” within the Corporate Social Responsibility Category. The prize has been awarded to Giuseppe Graffagnini, site manager of GEODIS’ warehouse in Aprilia and Pamela Calderoli, Head of Marketing Communication & Projects for the Contract Logistics Line of Business in Italy. This ceremony took place at the end of the conference “Urban logistics: ‘conflict’ or ‘partnership’”, held on November 25^th at Palazzo Turati, headquarter of the Chamber of Commerce of Milan.

Created and organized by Assologistica, in collaboration with its magazine Euromerci and Assologistica Cultura&Formazione association, the contest, that reached its XII° edition, is the main public reward in the transport and logistics sector in Italy, involving every year the most important logistics providers on the national and international scene.

The project of paper saving is part of the sustainable initiatives launched by GEODIS in Italy since the early 2000’s, as part of it Corporate and Social Responsibility program. Starting from the results of a study carried out by the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), according to which Italy has consumed almost 11 million tons of paper (more than Brazil, Russia, India, France, Spain, United Kingdom) in 2010, GEODIS has designed an innovative system to cut down the paper consumption and its environmental impact. First of all, it has identified an important customer, leader in the FMCG sector, as a pilot for its study, and then led the analysis during the re-engineering of the inbound process for the goods management of this client at Aprilia (Latina) and Landriano (Pavia) sites.

The operations were carried out not only to lead to an improvement of the operating result of the whole process, but also to completely reconsider it, in order to eliminate all printed materials. That’s how GEODIS has gone beyond a simple paper saving: it has, indeed, abolished the 100% of hard copies for the client, being able to manage the operating activities through a purely digital and totally radio frequency based (RF) approach. Given the remarkable results achieved, GEODIS went further, extending the project even to the outbound processes, making its activities for this customer totally green.

“We are very proud to have won again such an important acknowledgment”, confirms Pamela Calderoli. “The project that we have presented this year distinguishes us for the level of innovation, uniqueness and constant commitment applied to the development of a more and more tangible program of Corporate Social Responsibility. The CSR, indeed, is at the centre of our core business and in the last few years we have fine tuned several initiatives that witness our dedication to a sustainable logistics”.

The project “Let’s save the paper, let’s save the planet” has been implemented thanks to GEODIS’ local lean management and IT teams, always on the frontline for the rationalization of processes that ensure excellent services. In particular, the lean management team has completely re-designed the customer’s inbound and outbound processes to reach a total rationalization of the operations. Through a close collaboration with its IT department, GEODIS has also made substantial changes in the WMS, in order to digitalize all the data that were previously shared on paper. The tools implemented for the project have led to an efficiency increase of 11% in only two weeks, for a total saving of 250,865 sheets per year.

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