With a mobilization capacity of 10,000 containers per year, 85 percent coming mainly from China, India and the Philippines, and 15 percent from Europe and the United States, among other countries, there is no doubt that for an organization like Sodimac -Homecenter the recent closure of the port of Shanghai, the most important in the world for container shipping, It is news that has its directors doing everything possible to keep their shelves stocked so that their customers do not lack anything.
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It is not for less. They are already thinking about what the end of 2022 will be and about the greater internal demand for products of all kinds that can occur from the second half of the year, of course, once all the noise of the presidential elections has passed.
“The supply chain will depend on how long these closures are in China and other important ports in the world, if they last two or three months it will be very complicated,” warns Julián López Candamil, Sodimac-Homecenter Supply Chain Manager, who He maintains that this situation has been going on for more than four complex weeks and that, without a doubt, 2023 will depend on how long this paralysis caused by new outbreaks of coronavirus infection in that country and in the world is.
The concern not only revolves around the delay that this generates in the supply of goods and raw materials, but also in their cost.
The concern of Colombian businessmen, as they have stated in various scenarios, not only revolves around the delay that this generates in the supply of goods and raw materials, but also in their cost due to the increase in freight rates for transport. of containers, which at the height of the pandemic soared more than 250 percent for some destinations in South America, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
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And while Drewry’s World Container Index (WCI) is down 3.8 percent this year, falling below $9,000/FEU for the first time since the middle of last year, it remains well above pre-pandemic levels.
López Candamil maintains that the issue of high costs has been very great to the extent that there have been significant increases that are maintained in some cases, which will take time to return to normal.
And he clarifies that this circumstance was aggravated by the national strike last year (April-May) that caused them to hold up merchandise for more than four months in the port of Buenaventura, through which 80 percent of its imports arrive in the country.
contingency plan
With a firm economic revival, an end-of-year season beginning to loom for merchants, and a political landscape about to clear, somehow, lThe directors of this chain of stores have been working on a plan that allows them to face the new market conditions, which includes a greater activity of electronic commerce.
It is part of the positive that the pandemic leaves behind, points out the director of Homecenter, who recalled that this situation took them in full pilot tests of a new robotization system of their Funza distribution center, one of the most important in the country, precisely implemented to attend to the growing volume of electronic commerce, which multiplied at the height of the coronavirus due to the fact that people who were working and studying from home realized that they were not prepared for this situation and began to demand many products.
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“The pandemic has had several chapters: at the beginning there was a lot of product because everything was bought for a normal operating rate, then consumption habits changed because people began to spend more time at home, then came the shortage of some products, it fell manufacturing and then came the time when the entire supply chain was slowly catching up, and for each period we had to prepare ourselves,” López Candamil explained.
This preparation continues, not only with the strengthening of its robotization system, a technology developed in the world eight years ago and that the Chilean parent company brought to Colombia to make the operation of its distribution centers more efficient, but also with new investments.
Most of these will be concentrated in the expansion of the container yard of the distribution center located in Funza.
According to company directives, it will be about 80 million dollars, distributed in infrastructure, equipment and greater robotization.
On the infrastructure issue, will increase the storage capacity of the container yard by 50 percent in the same areawhich will allow them to go from 1,700 to 2,550 containers.
The warehouses where this distribution center operates will be expanded by a further 25 percent, going from 80,000 to 100,000 square meters in the first phase and up to 120,000 meters in the next.
“We hope to be operational with the new expansions by the end of 2023, which will give us greater operational capacity by the beginning of 2024,” said the manager.
Employment generation
Although the incorporation of state-of-the-art technology is one of the purposes of the organization, this does not imply a reduction in its personnel, since the objective is to be more efficient every day in all its processes to reduce the delivery times of its merchandise to the client. final.
Homecenter has six large distribution centers in the country, three main ones in Bogotá and its surroundings, which are the heart of the company, another in Medellín, one more in Cali and another in Barranquilla, to which are added other points of reception of goods from suppliers and deliveries from these located in large cities.
But only the one located in Funza demands a workforce of 700 collaborators operating 24/7. However, with the expansion that is underway, that payroll will be increased by 20 percent, generating work for the neighboring municipalities of Mosquera, Cota, Madrid, Tenjo and Funza.
Homecenter has six large distribution centers in the country, three main ones in Bogotá and its surroundings, another in Medellín, one more in Cali and another in Barranquilla.
“We want these regional centers to be within a day of customer deliveries. The arrival of new technologies, which in our case are robots that bring the shelves closer to the dispatchers, who with the help of the system know which products to take to assemble the orders that are sent to the final customer, without a doubt in the improvements in time of the deliveries of goods to customers”, says the Sodimac-Homecenter Supply Chain manager.
With this, order delivery times fell from two to one day, while this technology has allowed greater precision in the operation and a very low risk of packaging errors.
Without a doubt, they say in the company, the systems have artificial intelligence that allows the entire storage area to be reorganized so that the process is as fast as possible, exceeding the objectives in productivity and efficiency, and giving way, in turn, of a change in the environment and the way of working of the people who dispatch merchandise.