CERN chooses SNS ALOER for global supply chain consulting

              

Gene­va, June 2015

SNS and ALOERlead­ing providers of Sup­ply Chain exper­tise and solu­tions, are proud to announce the com­ple­tion of a Sup­ply Chain assess­ment study at CERN, the Euro­pean Orga­ni­za­tion for Nuclear Research.

CERN’s Supply Chain

At CERN, physi­cists and engi­neers are research­ing the fun­da­men­tal struc­ture of the uni­verse. They use the world’s largest and most com­plex sci­en­tif­ic instru­ments to study the basic con­stituents of mat­ter — the fun­da­men­tal particles.

With a logis­tics capa­bil­i­ty that can serve 10,000 peo­ple (staff and vis­it­ing researchers on the CERN site) as well as 4 major exper­i­ments spread over a 27 km long par­ti­cle col­lid­er,CERN’s Sup­ply Chain team saw sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ments to min­i­mize costs and increase efficiency.

It select­ed the Lyon-based con­sul­tan­cy on the basis of their proven expe­ri­ence and their abil­i­ty to car­ry out the study with­in the allot­ted time.

A study of the global supply chain

The objec­tives of the study revolve around assess­ing the cur­rent sup­ply infra­struc­ture, but also :

• stor­age operations,
• pur­chas­ing, replen­ish­ment, ware­hous­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion processes,
• as well as the struc­ture of their logis­tics team.

After a pre­sen­ta­tion on the chal­lenges of Sup­ply Chain Man­age­ment and a week of on-site vis­its and meet­ings, the con­sul­tants began their analy­sis and eval­u­a­tion of the data col­lect­ed over a two-month period.

The first objec­tive, expect­ed with­in two weeks of the site vis­its, was to pro­vide a restruc­tur­ing of the main ware­house, a 30-year-old facil­i­ty. The SNS ALOER con­sult­ing team pro­vid­ed two pos­si­ble designs.

They could enable CERN toincrease its stor­age capac­i­ty by 80% for pal­lets, and 20% for shelves. The designs would also con­tribute to safer oper­a­tions and high­er work productivity.

CERN Supply Chain: Looking ahead to 2015–2020

“When the results were pre­sent­ed to us, we were hap­py to con­firm that we had made the right Sup­ply Chain part­ner choice. The con­sult­ing team pro­vid­ed us with CAPEX, OPEX, ROI analy­sis for the dif­fer­ent solu­tions as well as the most impor­tant KPIs and bench­marks to eval­u­ate our oper­a­tions. SNS and ALOER gave us many points to work on, and we will cer­tain­ly be con­tact­ing them again in the future to help us imple­ment some of the sug­gest­ed solu­tions”, says Jur­gen De Jonghe, Site Ser­vices Group leader.