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Facing the real challenges
01 May 2007
Steel handling specialist WE Dowds says unloading vessels and filling up warehouses is “the relatively straightforward part”. “The real challenge, and the benchmark we use to gauge how well we are doing, is to deliver the material on time to the right customer,” says chairman Charles Dowds.
“We produce daily graphs of our loading times and we set ourselves the task of integrating seamlessly into the supply chain from mill to final customer. The way we achieved this was by investment in IT.”
WE Dowds specialises in handling steel, especially coils, through its South Wales facilities at Newport and Cardiff. It took the decision not to buy in an IT package but to develop its own,“because we could then tailor it to our specific requirements”, says Mr Dowds.
Dowds operates road and rail linked warehouses at both ports and decided to implement a wireless solution in place of its previous system of radio messaging between adjacent warehouses and faxes to remote ones.
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