São Paulo, Brazil, December 15, 2008 - CEVA Logistics, a leading global supply chain management company, today announced it has signed an agreement with the French company Saint-Gobain, a design, production and distribution company of materials for industrial and consumer markets, with a strong presence in the national market and 70 other countries. The operation will cover Saint Gobain's Santa Marina division of home utility products under the Marinex© brand and its Glass Division.
For the Santa Marina Division, CEVA will be responsible for the transfers between the Santa Marina factory, located in the city of São Paulo, and the one in Canoas in the Rio Grande do Sul State (south of Brazil), to the Central Warehouse in the Vila Leopoldina neighborhood, also in São Paulo.
The operations for the Glass Division are conducted inside the state of São Paulo and include picking up empty containers in the terminals of Santos and Guarujá, and transporting them to the site located in São Vicente.
"With this contract, we reach our goal of diversifying our portfolio of customers, advancing in the segment we call industrial", commented Paulo Franceschini, director of Business Development at CEVA.
It is forecasted that the flows for the two Saint-Gobain divisions will initially account for more than 180 trips a month. The model designed for Saint-Gobain was based on the management of CEVA's Operational Control Center (CCO) and shares the structure previously created to service the demands of the automobile sector.
"With the use of the CCO management of Saint-Gobain's operations, we have managed to optimize the fleet used for this kind of transportation and have offered advantages that we created years ago for another business segment", commented Ricardo Melchiori, director of CEVA Operations responsible for the Saint-Gobain operations.
The CEVA CCO works as a control tower operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, coordinating all transfer transportation between the CEVA units in South America and its customers. This technology programs and monitors more than 2,000 trips per month of approximately 260 dedicated vehicles.
In order to conduct activities like vehicle programming, load tracking and monitoring of performance indicators, CEVA uses the TMS Orion, a system developed internally to manage all of its transportation operations. This system received the ABML award (Brazilian Association of Movement and Logistics) as best information technology applied to logistics in 2006.
Elisandra Casaroti
elisandra.casaroti@cevalogistics.com
+55 11 4072.6466