After the development of the industrial revolution, logistical problems began to appear in the cities related to the parking of cars due to the increase in the concentration of population in the cities and with it, the increase in the number of vehicles.
This led to solutions for more efficient mobility in large cities such as New York or Chicago. The problem was that the price of land in the cities was increasing, so the investment in the construction of a conventional parking was not feasible.
For this reason, in the 1920s, the first high-rise car parks began to be installed, created by the Westinghouse company.
Today, 100 years later, this solution is again strongly presented for the concept of so-called smart cities.
In fact, in Spain, the first city to develop this idea has been Alcalá de Henares.
Although with a slightly different and more updated technology, it is curious how, passing years and years, solutions and ideas that were created a long time ago are still useful and valid.
This is how Mercadona employees call their logistics center located in León. This logistics center receives this name due to its commitment to technology so that employees do not have to make physical efforts during their workday. In the next post I am going to show you what I have learned about how this large 80000m2 facility works.
To get an idea of its distribution, this logistics center consists of 4 warehouses: one for dry products, one for cold products, one for frozen products and one for packaging. In addition, they have a bread factory. It employs 400 employees, of the 100 are dedicated to maintenance activities and the other 300 to supervision.
How do they work?
When they receive the trucks with the products, they separate the products into two categories, the products with high turnover and the products with less rotation. Products with a high turnover do not undergo any manipulation, they are directly sent to the stores as they arrive.
However, the products with less turnover go through several processes before being sent to the stores since the stores hardly have a warehouse because what matters is that the products are in view of the consumer, so they have to distribute it in boxes. First, a machine disassembles the pallet that contains only one product.
Second, each box is associated with a chip so that you have full control over its location. Later the product box is associated with other boxes of other products that will form the pallet that goes to the stores (each store has different interests, so each pallet is different), this process is called ‘wedding’.
Finally, another high-tech machine that knows the size of each product, places the boxes appropriately on the pallet based on their volume and fragility. After this step, the pallet is ready to be shipped. This entire process reduces 75% the time on the work that employees did manually.
As employees assure, the most complex thing about these centers is that the materials and information flow properly.
In addition, as additional information, to get an idea of the magnitude of this logistics center, each day they receive 1,000 trucks and are responsible for distributing the products to 110 stores in 4 different autonomous communities such as Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and Castilla y León.
Because of the big problem related to COVID-19 Real Madrid C. F. has facilitated the stadium to the government to be a key logistic partner during epidemic as a solidarity act.
Real Madrid is cordinated with different organism such as Top Sports Commission, Madrid Ministry and the Government in order to manage all together the supply and distribution of sanitary materials from donations.
As we saw in class a distribution center is a warehouse or other specialized building which is stocked with products to be redistributed to retailers, to wholesalers, or directly to consumers. In this case, they receive a lot of donations from different people or organisms most related with sports and then they distribute to the hospitals, residences, etc, acording to the government. See the following picture for a better understand of situation.
In this situation, this building can be consider a key partner because it finds inside the city, it’s one of the best comunicated points of the whole city and it has a lot of space to carry out the activity.
If you are more interested, here you can see more information:
Currently, Consum carries out its activity in the supply chain sector through a commercial network made up of more than 730 supermarkets between Consum and Charter franchises. It has a workforce that exceeds 15,363 workers, more than 3,300,000 member-clients and is present in the Comunidad Valenciana, Cataluña, Murcia, Castilla-La Mancha, Aragón and Andalucía.
The Coronavirus has triggered a crisis state that has stoped companies activity and it has confined people. Only the companies of some sectors are working properly. Supermarkets are one of them. They have seen a increase of earnings due to social alarm and the closing of others business.
Because of this situation they have taken actions to deal with. We find actions such as they have limited the maximun custmer number inside the supermarkets or they have given priority to elders to buy and others such as the stop of delivery orders and the reduction of schedule arguing they want to offer the best service.
But, really one of the most important reasons is they weren’table to satisfy four times the demand they had before the crisis with the same staff and they were forced to carry out those actions because they had to replenish supermarkets with the same workforce. Furthermore, customers go earlier to supermarket because they are scared and they want to find what they want. The consecuence is if basic products run out early, it won’t be clients after and they prefer to close two hours before.
I ask… Do you think it will be problems with supermarket supplying?
Last class, we were talking about how do supermarkets predict the demand… Since this crisis started it has been very difficult to predict and satisfy the demand of some products for companies in spite of there are a lot of similarities between different countries.
We know different products that has highlighted from the rest such as toilet paper or alcoholic gel. But why have it happened? I have found a report that explain this. People make copulsive purchases because in time of crisis we change our habits. In this situation, we get stressed and we want to get control of the situation, we do what our neightbours do. This time, because of the crisis is related to health we buy hygienic products to feel we will cleaned as far as possible.
But, once we get all and enough basics and fear disappears because we assume the situation, we come to racional people. For example, beer buying has skyrocketed almost 80% last days.
The blog of Logistics at MGEPS at UPV 