New sustainable logistics strategy at Intergamma
Project facts
- ClientIntergamma
- LocationThe Netherlands
- Date2020-2025
- ChallengeLogistic outsourcing company contracts expiring, leading to re-evaluation of logistics strategy with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.
- SolutionCentralised approach with one warehouse, offering more flexibility, lower costs and lower CO2 emissions.
The challenge
Intergamma is the DIY market leader in Benelux, with around 400 physical stores (Gamma and Karwei) as well as an online web shop. With its large-scale and complex logistics processes, the company’s approach to logistics has included outsourcing and contracting warehousing and transport activities and renting distribution centres. When those contracts were due to expire, Intergamma had a perfect window of opportunity. It was time to examine its logistical design – to centralise or not? – and assess its service providers, contracting only the best after a warehouse & transport tender process. Expert help and support with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence were needed in these assessments; particularly in the definition of a 5-year roadmap that would take their optimised business model, renewed logistics strategy and sharpened decision-making into a resilient and secure future.
The solution
For all kinds of logistics-related challenges and projects over the past 15+ years, Intergamma has relied on its intensive and trusted working relationship with Districon, a company of Royal HaskoningDHV. During the first phase of the project, Royal HaskoningDHV performed an extensive study to conclude that a centralised approach with one warehouse was best, offering more flexibility, lower costs and lower CO2 emissions. In the project’s second phase, Royal HaskoningDHV determined the client’s outsourcing strategy, then identified and contracted the right service providers for the job. Stakeholder management was key to this part of the project. Service providers had to be able to answer Intergamma’s sustainability demands. For example, all delivery and other vehicles must be low-carbon now, and able to deliver net zero emissions in the future (2030). Warehouse providers, meanwhile, were challenged to develop sustainable and productive solutions. This adds value throughout the entire supply chain – from receiving and warehousing (imported) goods, to swiftly transporting them to the end customer.
Intergamma and Districon have been partners for many years, and their flexibility, but especially pragmatic approach, align well with what a retailer seeks in these types of strategic issues.
The result
After a tendering process, the best-suited service providers for warehousing & transport have been contracted, and Intergamma has a sustainable and future-fit roadmap to support its new logistics strategy and its ambitions into the next 5 years. With a new centralised warehouse under construction (over 100,000 m2, to be completed in 2024), the complex flows of incoming and outgoing goods will be integrated, swift, and streamlined. Source security means availability of goods to the company’s 400 physical stores, and to its many online customers, is assured. The ongoing role of Royal HaskoningDHV as a trusted partner to Intergamma means they have the needed support to make informed decisions on strategy, tactics and operations as time goes on.
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