“Honeywell helped us build a working service center that can be used by other mills or any business that needs to ship at full capacity. With the right combination of people and technology, Stora Enso Langerbrugge was able to reduce manual processes by more than 50 percent while optimizing transport capacity by 95 percent, improving operations and increasing profitability.” 

Peter Colpaert, IT Project Manager, Stora Enso Langerbrugge

Stora Enso, an integrated paper, packaging and forest products company, has created through Stora Enso Logistics, the business opportunity to set up a Logistic Service Center in the Langerbrugge mill to serve the logistic needs for the Benelux and northern France market. Langerbrugge turned to Honeywell and its OptiVision^® business logic software and services to create and optimize its new platform at the Langerbrugge mill. Dubbed the Logistic Service Center (LSC) project, Stora Enso Langerbrugge wanted to solve a bigger issue than just control and measurement. With Honeywell’s help, Stora Enso Langerbrugge built a working service center that provides insight into logistics and creates a unique solution that reduces manual processes and helps optimize daily operations from load transport planning, communications and daily reporting.

Honeywell’s solutions helped Stora Enso Langerbrugge optimize and increase transport capacity while simultaneously reducing costs and manual labor. Specific benefits include:

• Optimized transport capacity by 95 percent
• Cut manual labor process in half
• Reduced freight costs and optimized each truck’s payload
• Automated 100 percent of logistics processes
• Helped employees recognize the value they provide with improved work ethic by increasing transportation market knowledge
• Transportation of more than 500,000 metric tons/year
• Improved customer service due to increased flexibility and availability of transport capacity
• Increased utilization of efficient IT tools

Stora Enso is an integrated paper, packaging and forest products company, producing publication and fine paper, packaging board and wood products, and is a global market leader in these areas. Stora Enso’s sales totaled EUR 14.6 billion in 2006. The company has some 44,000 employees in more than 40 countries on five continents. Stora Enso has an annual production capacity of 16.5 million tons of paper and board and 7.4 million cubic meters of sawn wood products, including 3.2 million cubic meters of value-added products. Stora Enso’s shares are listed in Helsinki, Stockholm and New York.

Founded in 1932, Stora Enso’s Langerbrugge mill employs 449 people and is situated in the harbor of Ghent. The mill produces newsprint and uncoated magazine paper using one basic raw material: recovered paper.

Stora Enso wanted to optimize logistics at its Langerbrugge mill and increase transport capacity. With more than 200 trucks a day in and out of the mill that needed to be loaded and organized, and more than 30 rail cars per week, Stora Enso Langerbrugge wanted to find the best way to automate and optimize these manual processes and reduce labor needs.

“In addition to the obvious reasoning behind optimizing our business processes, we set our sites even higher,” said Peter Colpaert, IT Project Manager, Stora Enso Langerbrugge. “Although our goal was to increase capacity and reduce our manual labor needs, we also saw the opportunity to become a true service center for anyone that wants to improve capacity and truly centralize and optimize transportation planning, standardize transport business and reduce transport costs.”

Prior to the LSC project, transportation planning at the mill was all done manually – load optimization, space optimization and manual entering of data helped create daily transport planning. Once planned, the only way to communicate about the transport capacity was through phone, fax or email. Drop-off sequence and time-slot assignments were completed via contact carriers and load confirmations were sent via fax or email, all of which needed to be automated.

With Honeywell’s help Stora Enso built a working service center that provides insight into logistics Stora Enso Langerbrugge needed to automate and then optimize to increase capacity and production.
With a longstanding partnership already in place, it was no surprise that Stora Enso Langerbrugge turned to Honeywell for help. Honeywell’s OptiVision business logic software provided a comprehensive solution for profitably managing the complete order-to-cash cycle focusing on primary business concerns.
With Honeywell’s help Stora Enso Langerbrugge identified ways to minimize costs and increase agility to respond to customer demands in a timely manner. Honeywell’s OptiVision software helped Stora Enso Langerbrugge optimize processes, increase transport capacities and decrease costs by enabling the company to optimize manpower requirements, allocate fixed assets, manage working capital and control spending. Tops Engineering, a Honeywell partner, provided the tool MaxLoad for space and load optimization. Another important player is Transporeon, the E-Logistic partner, with direct cross-linking between LSC and the carriers.
Said Colpaert, “After just three months into the updated process we continue to learn more and more about our processes, expecting significant savings per year.”
Another added benefit of the project has been Stora Enso Langerbrugge’s employees’ reaction and attitude. Continued Colpaert, “They are really thinking about how to get the most value out of their job and what they can offer. The progress is apparent and we are thrilled about the results and what we have accomplished with Honeywell which has provided advancement and set the competitive bar very high in our market. When we had the idea to build the service center Honeywell came ready to work. They listened and learned from us as we did from them and the partnership and team that we’ve built together is irreplaceable.”