Europa Worldwide Group is one of the UK’s largest privately owned transport and logistics companies. Established for nearly 50 years, Europa has built its reputation by providing market leading products and services to customers across a diverse range of sectors.

ENHANCING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Europa is driven by a motivation to provide high quality, fast and reliable services. In summer 2016, Europa will launch its revolutionary, bespoke £1.7m IT solution, Leonardo. Two years in the making, its first phase, “LeoRoad” is a fully bespoke system, tailor-made to meet the needs of Europa’s customers and its evolving business.

The launch follows a period of significant change following the opening of the company’s ‘1hub’, now the UK’s largest European groupage hub. The £30m high specification facility based in Dartford, Kent, centralises all of Europa’s European road freight from the company’s network of 11 regional branches. The objective of the system was to further improve responsiveness, efficiency, productivity and future scalability across all 11 UK sites.

SYSTEM SELECTION AND IMPLEMENTATION

As part of its major IT and infrastructure investment programme, Europa looked to source a mobile computing solution that would support the road transit process within the ‘1hub’ facility. Previously a paper-based process, the technology was required to support the loading of trailers from the rack-based location system.

Following a thorough trial process, Europa selected the Advantech-DLoG DLT-V8312 vehicle mount computer proposed by TouchStar Technologies. Rugged and reliable, the DLT-V8312 provided a full screen device that integrated seamlessly with LeoRoad’s transit applications. The devices fulfilled Europa’s requirement for a large user friendly touchscreen allowing Europa to effectively capture the required data within its transit processes.

With the systems requirement fully specified, Europa decided that the implementation would be undertaken in two incremental stages. The initial rollout of the new technology, equipped Europa with the resource and support to test the new technology against its existing processes and train the current users. TouchStar worked closely with Europa, undertaking the installation and commissioning to ensure a smooth and timely deployment of the final approved system.

CHOOSING TOUCHSTAR

Richard Litchfield, IT Director at Europa comments, “Our goal is to work with our customers to provide a range of value enhancing logistics benefits. The strength of the relationship between TouchStar and Advantech-DLoG gave us the confidence that we would be investing in a rugged, fully supported solution that dovetails with our existing operations. The Advantech-DLoG DLT-V8312 vehicle mount computer has provided us with high speed data capture and fast efficient data communication. This has improved efficiency and productivity in addition to providing the flexibility and operational capacity to support our plans for future growth.

“We developed our own IT solution in-house so that we could design and deliver a fully bespoke solution, tailored to our needs and the evolving needs of our fast-growing business. TouchStar has supported that vision 100 per cent - listening to our requirements and working with us to develop a best fit solution that provided flexibility and scalability that is aligned with our future requirements. They work hard to ensure that we get the best out of our system and that is very valuable to us. In short, we feel we have made the right choice and would highly recommend TouchStar.”

THE FUTURE

Ultimately the Leonardo project will see the firm’s operations, finance and sales systems completely transformed – benefitting customers, European and UK partners. The mobile computing investment is a key component of this vision. Europa continues to harness the benefits from the new implementation and look into new ways in which they can extend the use of technology to secure even more operational benefits.

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