Month: May 2020

Synergy’s SnapFulfil has been placed on the elite Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) – for the ninth successive year.

SnapFulfil is one of a handful of solutions worldwide to be selected for the prestigious 2020 WMS MQ. Businesses are independently measured on both vision and ability to execute.

The award winning, cloud-based WMS has this year progressed from the ‘niche’ quadrant (focused on producing tangible feature improvements) towards ‘visionary’ thanks to its product roadmap, which focuses on addressing WMS trends and new-commerce distribution needs.

The MQ guide additionally acknowledges SnapFulfil’s easy configurability and inbuilt flexibility to adapt to changing requirements, via an ever evolving rule engine that allows high levels of noncode adaptability to support customer-specific and vertical-industry-specific requirements.

Also highlighted by Gartner MQ is SnapFulfil’s unique and scalable pricing strategy, which allows companies to flex their number of users and associated costs – based on seasonal demand variations – plus an investment strategy of simplifying, as opposed to the industry norm of complicating, its offering.

SnapFulfil’s UK & Europe CEO Tony Dobson says: “We are so proud to have received this prestigious recognition once again from Gartner MQ, where SnapFulfil is considered one of the most reliable, robust and efficient systems globally.

“It recognises our ongoing commitment to deliver a system where customers can enjoy a rapid return on investment. Also, the ease of which operators can execute our system stands out from the crowd in what is a highly competitive marketplace. With social distancing and tighter budgets the new ‘norm’, SnapFulfil can be implemented remotely and operational in 45 days or less, and it’s not expensive to set in motion, or difficult to realign.”

Heppner, the leading independent specialist of international flows to and from France, has appointed Ghislain Fernandez as International Managing Director.

Fernandez graduated with a Master’s degree in Political Sciences from Sciences Po Lyon as well as with a Master’s degree in International Transport and Logistics from the Sorbonne University. He started his career in the sector more than twenty years ago. In 1999, he joined the French subsidiary of the family-owned company Willi Betz, where he held various Executive Management positions in Portugal, Romania and in France as Managing Director. In 2012, he joined the Geodis Group as Deputy Managing Director in charge of road transport and freight forwarding activities, before being appointed Managing Director Central and Eastern Europe in 2015.

Fernandez, with his twenty years of experience, is now joining Heppner Group to take over the General Management of the group’s international subsidiaries located in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. He will be responsible for the management and development of these subsidiaries, relying on the know-how of each country. “One of my priority missions is to optimize the support of our clients abroad by combining the operational excellence of our teams with the specific expertise from each country. This strategy is in line with the actions Heppner has been taking for several years to strengthen its presence on international flows”, he emphasises.

Punto System recently handled a time critical shipment of one case of 793kg containing spare parts urgently needed for a broken gas piping site in eastern Greece. Reacting to a really short notice under Covid-19 lock-down emergency, Punto System designed a tailor made solution for this critical case integrating freighter liner service to an European hub and full charter flight up to final destination Country.

Cargo has been collected on Thursday evening in Houston and boarded as priority cargo onto Cargolux freighter to LUX taking off during the night. At the same time a full charter An22 aircraft was booked and positioned on the parking at Luxembourg, waiting to receive the incoming freight coming from United States.

Cargolux freighter landed on Friday evening and transshipment operations has been performed under priority. Ramp airport staff transferred and boarded cargo onto our charter aircraft during Friday night allowing a sharp on time departure to Athens on Saturday morning. Charter aircraft landed at destination towards noon in time for import clearance and same day express delivery to destination site by dedicated truck.

Italian packaging manufacture specialist Sitma has made available its skills, machinery and workforce to package a supply of over 30.0000 masks for the Municipalities of Castelvetro and Vignola, in the district of Modena, northern Italy.

The gesture assumes further relevance given that Sitma is the first company to pack masks with paper. The packaging paper is supplied by UPM Specialty Papers, recognized for sustainable flexible packaging papers, with which Sitma is developing various R&D projects.

Operate globally without forgetting your roots
Sitma Machinery, which a little over a month ago mourned the death of its founder Aris Ballestrazzi to Covid-19, has jumped into action to support the fight against coronavirus in a concrete and sustainable way, while respecting all rules and regulations to protect employee health. Among the existing projects, the company made itself available to package with paper – free of charge – a first stock of more than 30.000 masks for the municipalities of Castelvetro and Vignola, in the Modena area, to be then distributed to the population.

“This is a project with great symbolic value, of which I am sure Aris Ballestrazzi would have been particularly proud,” said Fabrizio Della Casa, general manager of Sitma.

“Ours is a company with a strong international vocation – so much so that most of our trade takes place abroad. At the same time, however, Sitma has always maintained a very close link with its territory. In a time like this, it therefore seemed logical to put ourselves at the disposal of the community offering concrete support. ”

Addressing the emergency with the environment in mind
The company has thought not only about the health emergency, but also the environmental one. Today, masks are a primary necessity in the global context. Their mass distribution, combined with the collapse in oil prices and the relative cost of the plastic products derived from it, can lead to a real environmental risk deriving from the disposal of billions of units.

“Sitma has for years embraced the path of sustainability, investing heavily in the creation of cutting-edge solutions with a low environmental impact,” Della Casa continued. “For example, we were among the first to develop packaging systems that used paper instead of plastic. It therefore seemed logical to apply this principle to the mask project. Products packaged individually with paper, such as our masks, can in fact be thrown away, together with the label, into the waste paper collection, making it easy and safe to dispose of them.”

An international partnership to support the local community
Specifically, the masks are manually fed and then automatically packaged individually with paper. The paper is produced by UPM Specialty Papers, which specializes in creating high-quality sustainable flexible packaging papers . The package also bears a label, applied with a Bizerba apparatus, that is once again made of sustainable material. The completely recyclable product is supplied by UPM group company Raflatac. The Sitma machine is also sanitized before and after the production phases, to guarantee a process that is not only sustainable but safe.