Air Liquide
In November 2003 another successful collaboration between OPSI Systems and Unitrans went live with the implementation of FLO at Air Liquide Southern Africa.
Planning occurs centrally at the Alrode depot for the four fleets scheduled by FLO: bulk and cylinder fleets in Alrode, and cylinder fleets in Durban and Cape Town. The Durban and Cape Town branches access FLO remotely for the purposes of route viewing and document generation.
A number of documents must be generated for each vehicle leaving the three depots due to their compressed gas cargo falling within the definition of 'Dangerous Goods'. Further, Air Liquide has international standards requirements for document generation. Part of the customization undertaken by OpSi includes the generation of a full set of such documentation by FLO, including Liquid Oxygen Conformance Certificates, Dangerous Goods Declarations, Loading and Offloading Checklists, Maintenance Requests, trip sheets and pick slips.
Willem Botha, the then Logistics Manager at Air Liquide Southern Africa, says “FLO has helped to create and entrench a structured and disciplined environment in which to conduct dispatch and transport operations in general.”
Another result of the transport of Dangerous Goods is that a number of regions are no-go areas, and a number of populated areas and civil structures (e.g. tunnels) were removed from FLO's road network to ensure that vehicles were not scheduled to travel in these restricted zones.
Further custom development was undertaken in the form of a FLO front-end tool for supplier allocation for bulk deliveries. Here, a visual interface is used to facilitate the allocation of jobs to a number of possible suppliers, given the current availability of each product at each supplier.
Willem Botha adds “The main feature of FLO has been the adaptability and flexibility of FLO, to accommodate our specific operational requirements in line with our ERP system.”
