Enhancing resilience, transparency and sustainability for future-ready logistics
The logistics industry hasn’t had an easy journey in recent years. The pandemic and global conflicts have made one thing clear: having real-time information is more important than ever in order to respond agilely to threats to the supply chain.
In this market with increasingly insecure supply chains, Hellmann Worldwide Logistics successfully serves the individual requirements of its customers—on land, in water and in air—with its products Airfreight, Seafreight, Road and Rail, and Contract Logistics. Hellmann wants to expand this path of success by growing, acquiring further business areas and by remaining fit for the future. But the greater the growth, the more complex the integration of the various transport and warehouse management systems, ERP and back-end systems, data and processes—on whose security, availability, robustness and performance Hellmann depends.
“With our previous platform solution—the EDI/EAI platform of an American competitor—immensely high operating, maintenance and development costs were a given,” explains Peter Schenk, Head of IT Governance, IT – Supporting Functions and Platforms at Hellmann Logistics Worldwide. After a software release and the subsequent loss of important functions for the company, Hellmann decided to embrace modernization and standardization.
Hellmann sought an integrated solution to meet these objectives:
- Meeting the increasing transparency, resilience and sustainability requirements in the logistics market
- Managing the high operating, maintenance and development costs of the existing technology platform
- Accelerating the planned growth and acquisition of new customers, partners and business units
“After a short and pragmatic market analysis, we decided on the IBM® webMethods integration platform—for technical reasons and because of the possibility of building new interfaces and thus being able to follow our growth course,” says Schenk.
IBM webMethods was instrumental in orchestrating Hellmann's transformative journey. Designed to integrate interfaces across the entire logistics value chain, it ensured seamless data transfer, accommodating both validation and custom business logic. Its capacity to effortlessly incorporate existing and new applications facilitated uncomplicated integration, even amid evolving customer and market demands. The platform's ability to map future integrations and adapt to shifting trends, such as transitioning from EDI processes to contemporary API technology, supported Hellmann's commitment to continuous modernization and expansion. This comprehensive transformation capability propelled Hellmann towards unprecedented growth, enhanced operational efficiency and robust business resilience.
Hellmann swiftly implemented the new platform after the proof of concept, and the webMethods team ensured prompt transfer of knowledge. Schenk credits the success of the transformation to making the whole business aware of the advantages of modernization and involving all relevant teams throughout the change management process.
“Modernization must go hand in hand with standardization, according to our experience. It offers the opportunity to consolidate customer integrations in order to eventually cover the same number of customers with fewer implementations and to increase overall efficiency along the entire supply chain,” Schenk summarizes.
The transparent and powerful platform helped Hellmann realize additional benefits:
- Growth enablement and scalability
- Easy migration and integration of more than 750 application interfaces and 500 customers
- Facilitation of standard compliance and future-readiness
The international full-service logistics provider Hellmann Worldwide Logistics was founded in 1871 as a family business in Osnabrück and today employs 12,348 people in 173 countries. With its logistics solutions, the company implements the individual requirements of its customers by air, water, road, rail as well as in warehouses. In 2021, the Hellmann Group achieved sales of around 4.07 billion euros.
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