With 9 production sites and 5 million tonnes of cement sold each year, Ciments Calcia, the French subsidiary of the HeidelbergCement group, is a major player in the French cement industry. In order to supply the Ile-de-France market, HeidelbergCement France has several storage terminals mainly supplied by rail. For this mode of transport, the cement manufacturer operates more than 400 wagons and carries out approximately 1,000 full load trains per year.
Today, HeidelbergCement France has two main challenges: decarbonisation and digitalisation, and both challenges also concern transport.
To support it in this process, the group has called on the company Everysens for the past three years.
"Thanks to the Everysens solution, I am convinced that we can achieve these two objectives by switching our road transport to rail as much as possible. As part of our commitment to the ADEME's Fret 21 programme, our ambition is to reduce our transport-related CO2 emissions by 5% over the next three years. We called on Everysens to set up a collaborative platform enabling us to optimise our rail activity. We wanted all the information to be grouped together on the same platform and accessible to all, and this was a successful gamble. Today we are continuing our collaboration in order to go even further in our objectives of rationalisation and therefore decarbonisation of our transport. Philippe Labbé, Logistics Director HeidelbergCement France - Ciments Calcia
At the beginning of the project, HeidelbergCement France's main objective was to make the railways more reliable and digital and to ensure a fine control of its rail transport operations. Since then, the company has relied on its collaboration with Everysens to go even further in terms of modal shift. Indeed, the centralisation of all transport information and the integration of partner service providers directly into the tool (railway companies, wagon hire companies, etc.) makes it possible to have a real railway control tower.
Nicolas Plouviez, Logistics Performance Controller for HeidelbergCement France - Ciments Calcia, says "Before the Everysens solution was deployed, the management of HeidelbergCement France's transport processes was difficult and tedious, with three main problems: to have real-time routing information, to centralize and make the data reliable, and to have relevant and easy-to-implement management tools (KPIs).
The tool allows Ciments Calcia to proactively monitor its shipments from A to Z, automating time-consuming tasks. Nicolas Plouviez underlines "After 3 years, I can confirm that the return on investment is strong. Thanks to Everysens, the productivity of our rail activity has improved by 5%, and the data management time by the logistics teams has been reduced by about 30%."
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