International transport solutions with arvato services: fast, transparent and economical

Whether large corporations or SMEs with extensive shipping volumes: arvato services now offers money- and time-saving worldwide transport solutions for every requirement, based on a specially developed application. The arvato services transport solution allows for inexpensively sending express and standard packages, air and sea freight around the world. This one-of-a-kind solution is based on an IT assisted multi-carrier system that currently encompasses 100 carriers across multiple country borders. arvato services customers can select the carrier that best meets their price and quality needs, depending on their speed, service and destination requirements. Designed for intuitive user handling, the transport management system can either be linked in to the customer’s order management system (SAP etc.) or accessed directly on the Internet.

The arvato Transport Information System, or artis, is multilingual, available in many European countries, and saves customers time and money. Package prices and the right transport service providers can be ascertained with just a few clicks on the mouse, and in a matter of seconds. All the documents needed can be quickly and conveniently output thanks to online printing of the labels and the bill of lading. This allows arvato services customers to optimize their in-house workflow and considerably boost the productivity of their logistics. Sophisticated tracking and tracing solutions, along with detailed reports, make for maximum transparency and security. There is even an option to provide Internet pages where end customers can track their shipments.

SYNAXON AG, Europe’s biggest group of IT retailers, already offers the members of its four brands – PC-Spezialist, Akcent, iTeam and Microtrend – the option of shipping their products via artis. “Costs of transportation and shipping are an increasingly important issue for IT retailers and computer vendors. Every price hike makes the product more expensive for the end customer. We want to help our customers optimize the cost of shipping their products. That is why we chose arvato services as our partner in matters of transportation. artis has helped us to optimize the package-shipping process enormously, resulting in considerable time and cost savings for our partners,” explains SYNAXON AG CTO Frank Weber.

Although when using artis the number of transport service providers and services used increases depending on the list of requirements, this does not mean that SYNAXON AG, or any other arvato services customer, has to spend more time on reviewing their costs of carriage. Regardless of the number and combination of carriers used, arvato services provides a single monthly invoice, on the agreed settlement date, which lists all transports in detail, including all of the information and references required by the sender.

Frank Weber, CTO of SYNAXON AG, says: “We are very happy with the solution developed by arvato services, with its performance and the comprehensive service provided. Some 720 SYNAXON partners already use artis to process the shipping of their national and international express and standard transports.”

The artis solution developed for the SYNAXON AG, and specially tailored to the requirements of the IT group, is based on an IT platform that is centrally administered but used in a decentralized way by the various IT and computer retailers. In this way, each individual SYNAXON partner can control the shipping of his merchandise while still benefiting from the centrally agreed services and prices. This gives him performance at a price and in a quality that he wouldn’t have been able to obtain on his own.

“In the beginning, there was no central solution in place at all,” explains Jens Rettig, the responsible project manager at arvato services. “As a result, volumes, qualities and prices were less than transparent, and cost-optimized shipping for the individual partners and for the group as a whole were not possible.”

Silvio Richter, Head of Transport Management at arvato services, adds: “We are pleased to be able to provide such good support to our customers and their customers with our solutions. We develop transport management solutions on a very large scale, and can therefore offer such custom solutions based on our know-how and systems expertise. Our clients also profit from the service-oriented added benefits we offer them: flexible pick-up times, Saturday delivery or the combined cost-of-carriage invoice we generate, to name just a few. We are seeing rising demand for solutions in this field and are sure that we can provide the right products.”

Get more information about our transport management.