Explosive growth warehousing operation made possible at Royal Dutch LV Logistics

Royal Dutch LV Logistics managed to grow warehouse capacity by 200% in three years time. That required a different WMS. After an extensive selection process, they chose CORAX Saas WMS from Davanti Warehousing.

Rick van Dijk, continuous improvement manager: “Warehousing is a real growth market for us. You can only be successful in this market if you are flexible, automate many administrative actions and can quickly link to systems of customers and partners.”

The warehousing branch of the hundred-year-old Royal Dutch LV Logistics on the Rotterdam Maasvlakte was established in 2019. LV Logistics is a full-service logistics service provider with services in the field of Air & Ocean freight, road transport, ferry and container transport, warehousing and customs. The company offers these services in-house with its own employees, offices and equipment. Renewables, offshore, oil & gas, steel and automotive are a number of sectors in which LV Logistics is active. The warehousing branch grew from 6,000 square meters in 2019 to 22,000 square meters in 2022.

Copyright: Royal Dutch LV Logistics.

The choice for growth in warehousing required a fully-fledged WMS.

Van Dijk: “Excel was absolutely no longer sufficient. We wanted to know and record everything from available locations to how much weight a scaffolding can actually carry. The desire to move towards providing services for bulk, fulfillment and e-commerce led to the need for good and flexible software, with links to platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce.”

Various products in the warehouse

The warehouse filled up quickly. “We took every opportunity that presented itself.” The result is a warehouse that not only houses chicken coops, but also massage tables and merchandise. The fine-meshed orders, sometimes up to hundreds of orders per day, required at least a choice of WMS software that would, among other things, limit manual administrative work.

Van Dijk: “To give an example: some of our customers are unable to link their systems directly to the WMS. For this we wanted to have a solution that generates little administrative work. We do this via the CORAX API. We receive files from our customer, convert them and offer them to the standard API.”

With the WMS, Royal Dutch LV Logistics wanted to be able to process, register goods, take care of put-away to racks, supplement pick locations and have flexible options for an allocation strategy. “We support many logistical processes in our warehouse. Sometimes we store entire trailers, pallets or boxes. We also take care of piece picking.”

‘Do as little as possible outside of the WMS software’

“It really is our aim to do as little as possible outside of CORAX. Especially in the e-commerce world, something has to happen quickly, so you don’t want to perform any external actions. From my own experience, at other logistics service providers, I know that companies do not always handle Value Added Services within a WMS environment. This also means you opt in for many extra administrative actions. We can register VAS in CORAX and also use that information to create invoices for our customers.”

Automate with packing table and nShift

The logistics service provider is also working smarter via the packing table function. “It was our goal to establish a link with nShift, so that we can automatically offer weights and dimensions of a shipment to nShift. For this we use the standard nShift connector. Together with the packing table, we can check and pack orders and select the right carrier based on a certain booking profile. You indicate in the master data which box has what size, after which the system automatically fills in the rest. This is registered by nShift and forwarded to the final carrier. Of course you still have to pack the product yourself. This saves us one and a half to two FTEs and reduces the risk of error.” The choice for CORAX WMS has given Royal Dutch LV Logistics the opportunity to distinguish itself from other service providers. “For example, the WMS helps us to carry out the kitting activities.”

Grow fast by working smart

Royal Dutch LV Logistics has allowed the warehouse operation to grow considerably, but manages to limit the many actions that fulfillment and e-commerce are known for. “We are able to do that thanks to the existing links in CORAX, among other things. The software enables us, for example, to add a commercial invoice to a shipment. For this, data is extracted from the WMS and we communicate this with the transporter via nShift. The carrier can then use this data to create an electronic commercial invoice. This is how we grow fast, but also how work smarter.”