Case Study: SCA Transforest

SCA Forest Products produces high quality publication papers for newspapers, magazines and catalogues, pulp, solid-wood products and forest based biofuels.

However, winning more business posed certain IT challenges in order to successfully meet the requirements of various new customers. For many years, warehouse and distribution processes were managed from custom-designed, home-grown warehouse management systems specifically built to support forest products. These systems were not flexible enough to process different types of goods while taking individual customer requirements into concern. Each terminal system worked individually and offered no visibility across the organisation, making it difficult for logistics managers to make well-informed decisions. Therefore it became clear to SCA Transforest that with their ambition to successfully attract new customers it was critical that they invested in a functionally rich best-of-breed warehouse management system.

After the decision to invest was made, the team at SCA Transforest began a thorough selection process to find the right WMS vendor. A dozen vendors across Europe received the RFP. Four were selected for a more detailed evaluation, and ultimately RedPrairie was selected.

It was decided to implement the solution at the largest and most complex terminals first and at the associated terminals afterwards. Together, SCA Transforest and RedPrairie developed a system template that would cover the complexity of each of the terminals; that could be applied for each implementation; and that would ensure that system could be rolled out to new sites in a quick and cost effective manner.