Global Courant 2023-05-13 09:10:14
What happens with the product from the click that confirms the purchase until it reaches the hands of the consumer.
Ecommerce is growing steadily at the local level. And the data from the three days of the Hot Sale, with a notable increase in users buying online, confirm this. More than one million average users per day, strengthened the use of digital media to make purchases beyond the economic crisis. But what about behind the scenes, what happens with a product from the click that confirms the purchase until it reaches the consumer’s hands.
Referring to the back room of electronic commerce is talking about logistics. “Logistics is like an orchestra, we can all have an instrument, but making it work well is the challenge. Maybe it’s easy to have 1,000 trucks, to have 250 branches, but the challenge here is to make them coordinate well so that a shipment arrives in 24 hours The magic has to happen here,” says Alejandro Rinaldi, Andreani’s IT Director, in a relaxed meeting with journalists at the Intelligent Transfer Center in Benavídez, one of the bases of operations where some 8,000 packages can be processed per hour and make 5 million shipments in a month.
Andreani
The meeting is not accidental. It’s Wednesday morning, it’s the third and last day of Hot Sale 2023, one of the most anticipated business events of the year. The shed explodes with packages, Andreani has 2,500 corporate clients plus hundreds of SMEs, who enter as quickly as they leave (they cannot stay more than four hours in that place). From there they are distributed in trucks (they have 3,600 for distribution) that will take them to the corresponding branch in each point of the country and then the consumer picks it up in that place or receives it at home.
“You are now behind the scenes, the Hot Sale is happening, and from here we pull the strings so that everything goes well,” says Rinaldi, adding: “This is the Transfer Center where the logistics take place. And the logistics are basically the business of generating merchandise in a decentralized way, consolidating it and decentralizing it again”.
Entering the 16,000 m2 rectangle that the company has in Benavidez is almost like immersing yourself in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory: everything that happens there generates amazement. In that shed there is no music, although if one stops to observe the complete picture, everything goes to rhythm. The machinery works like a true Swiss watch (although the equipment is of Dutch origin): land rails that move carts -with pallets full of products- automatically and carts driven by an operator with a driver who fulfill the same function. The vertical sorter (automatic parcel sorter) located on a mezzanine has a processing capacity of 8,000 packages per hour, which scans and classifies 92% of the 90,000 packages that pass daily through that center.
Andreani
But that orchestra that Rinaldi alluded to at the beginning can work in terms of logistics thanks to Technology that also helps to coordinate the interaction between so many actors, speed up processes and even reduce the margins of error, because while all this is happening in Now, there is a consumer eager to find his object of desire. “Behind each shipment, new technologies are deployed to continue improving the experience of our customers and recipients, who increasingly demand more information and immediacy”, explains the IT Director.
SN