CASE STUDY

Saint Gobain Isover: Rapidly scalable visibility solution with high levels of automation

About Saint-Gobain Isover

Saint-Gobain Isover G+H, based in the German city of Ludwigshafen, is Europe's leading manufacturer of mineral wool insulation materials. With around 1,000 employees, this subsidiary of the French building materials group Saint-Gobain most recently achieved an annual turnover of €356 million. The company sends up to 260 trucks through Germany every working day, and all belong to externally contracted carriers. This means that over 50,000 trucks leave the company’s four plants every year, delivering insulation materials to as many as 12,000 addresses, each an average of 400 kilometres away. The total mileage is about 21 million kilometres, which corresponds to more than 500 circumnavigations of the Earth.

With real-time visibility, customer and internal queries on order status decreased by 40%, leading to a direct reduction in personnel costs in internal sales and transportation planning.

Ralf Klobes, Head of Transport Management,
Saint-Gobain Isover

Challenges

Until 2019 Saint-Gobain Isover didn’t know the location of any individual transport and couldn’t provide its customers with this information. The status of each transport had to be checked manually with the carrier, which was very time consuming.

"The distribution of building materials has long been a 'black box'. The last reliable status report for manufacturers and customers was when the vehicle was loaded at the factory or at the temporary storage facility," says Martin Krumhaar, Director Supply Chain at Saint-Gobain Isover. After that, a lot of things got lost in the fog, until the truck actually arrived at the agreed unloading point which was "unsatisfactory for all parties".

Solution

Transporeon Sixfold
Best Carrier
No-Touch Order

The company selected Transporeon Sixfold, as this solution is closely linked to the existing Transporeon system and no new interfaces were required. It integrated seamlessly into Saint-Gobain Isover’s SAP environment, avoiding duplicate entries and separate data storage in different systems. Looking ahead, the Sixfold solution enables further automation steps together with Transporeon, such as dynamic Time Slot Management, capacity matching, and predictive transport assignment.

Another advantage of the Sixfold solution is rapid scalability. Even before implementation, all of Saint-Gobain Isover’s contracted carriers were already connected to the Transporeon platform and 38% were already connected to Sixfold. From outset, these carrier transports could be displayed in the Saint-Gobain Isover system without any effort and, of course, integration on the Transporeon platform provides the manufacturer with even greater visibility of available carriers.

Results

Customer & carrrier satisfaction

Since implementing Transporeon Sixfold, customer satisfaction has increased, especially for construction site transports. Carriers appreciate making fewer check calls and they experience reduced wait times and empty runs: a classic win/win situation.

Accuracy & punctuality

Saint-Gobain Isover now tracks 90-95% of all transports to the minute, predicting the precise arrival time in 90% of cases. Truck punctuality has increased, and waiting times at reception are much more predictable. Less waiting time means fewer fines – the company saves nearly €50,000 per annum.

High level of automation

The solution runs more automatically than Saint-Gobain Isover expected. There is no need for driver interaction, eliminating human error. Instead, the truck’s telematics system is connected and everything works automatically.