Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - August 2008 - (Page 44) CASE STUDY Project Logistics Company Provides a Bridge, and a Road to Success BY THOMAS FOSTER Cutting down and then replacing trees, building temporary bridges over rail lines and aluminum roads through farmland—these are just some of the logistics challenges that Quinn Chemical faced when it built a new plant in Germany. F or most manufacturing and retail supply chains, the greatest challenges center on managing suppliers, vendors, inbound logistics and other front-end processes. The final delivery link is often the easy part that can be handled by any reliable transportation provider. With large project supply chains, however, the order of difficulty is often just the opposite. The final logistics leg can make or break the success of huge industrial construction projects. Consider the case of Quinn Chemicals, an Irish company that is now just completing a large plant in Germany for the production of MMA, which is a base for acrylic glass, such as Plexiglas. The chemical plant is being built in Leuna, near the Czech border in what was East Germany. Old, abandoned factories have been taken down in the area after years of neglect to make room for new industrial projects. While this brownfield area is still designated as a place for heavy industry, it also has gained much more transportation infrastructure, including a state-of-the-art, high-speed inter-city express rail line and a new major highway. “There has been a push for industrial investment in the area, but actually building there is now very difficult,” says Emanuel Scerra, project director for BDP Project Logistics in Germany, which handled the final delivery of the inbound components for Quinn Chemical. “The new infrastructure projects have limited the ability to move anything into the area larger than standard containers or trucks.” According to Dermot Carey, senior plant manager for Quinn Chemicals, the main challenge was the safe, on-time delivery of key components to maintain the construction schedule. “Much of this material is large and very difficult to transport,” he says. “Just about every leg requires special permits from various different authorities. The logistics involved detailed advance planning down to the exact weight and dimension of each piece and determination of the center of gravity for each component.” The most important components of Quinn’s chemical plant were custom-made by contractors all over the world. A 270-ton reactor was made in Deggendorf, in Bavaria, and two 100-ton reactors were made in Kobe, Japan. Eight towers from 30 to 48 meters long, four to six meters in diameter, and weighing up to 155 tons were built in Shanghai, China. All of the multimillion-dollar pieces took many months to design and fabricate, and each piece was unique and critical to the final project. “Redundancy or replacement of any piece for any reason was clearly not an option,” says Carey. 44 AUGUST 2008
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