IMPLEMENTATION OF INTERMODAL TRANSPORT SYSTEM IN FORD OTOSAN

1- General Information of Ford Otosan

The first plant of FORD OTOSAN has been founded in 1959 in Istanbul and various models had been produced in this plant such as Ford Escort cars, FORD Taunus, FORD Transit and Anadol cars which is the first Turkish car designed and manufactured by Ford Otosan in Turkey..

The second plant has been constructed in 1982 for producing heavy Trucks as well as producing the engine and power train components for Transit vehicles..

Kartal Spare parts centre has been founded in 1997 which is one of the biggest warehouse in the middle east..

And the last one Kocaeli plant is introduced In the year 2000 which is founded with an equal share of Ford Motor company and Koç Holding.

The first production was launched on 29th January, 2001 starting with Transit production and In May 2002 the new Transit Connect had been launched..

Approximately a year after the introduction, the plant has been awarded with ISO 9001/ ISO 14001 certificates and selected the best plant in the world within Ford plants in the last 4years in terms of Ford production systems

2- Inbound/outbound Logistics Strategy of Ford Otosan

Outbound

As you can see on the picture that the jetty is located next to the plant which is suitable to accommodate the various size of vessels including 200.000sqm of a vehicle compound area..

Finished vehicles are shipped by fix scheduled vessels, 4 shipments in a week into 3 different routes. And 95% of exported vehicles have been shipped from this jetty Last year and all import vehicles are discharged from this jetty in the same manner..

Inbound

Accordingly the imported volume of production parts from Europe to Turkey is also increased significantly.. Number of trailer loaded in Europe for Ford Otosan is increased from 2thousand level to 12thousand ...

There are approximately 450 suppliers located all over Europe who are supplying various parts to Kocaeli plant

The materials from these suppliers are being consolidated in the consolidation centre located in Cologne by using Ford network within Europe. Before the consolidation in Cologne there are some pre-consolidation centres at various places located in Europe which is called ODC’s in order to consolidate material for having better cube utilization and cost efficiency.. Today, 35% of total imported materials for FORD OTOSAN are being shipped from U.K. and the rest 65% are coming from the continent..

In the year 2005, 3400 cbm loaded per day which is about equal to 45-50 Trailers loading per day..

And 11.000 transportation units have been shipped last year..

This year, it is expected to be shipped about 4000cbm per day which is equal to 55Trailer loading units per day

it was very obvious that only Trailer would have not been enough to carry that volume. Then what was the solution? How could we handle this volume?

3- Overall view to Intermodal Shipment

The answers was; what alternatives were available in the market at this time and which one will fit our process in line with our requirements. If we look into the details of each options... Road transportation by TRAILERS was currently available... Railway was tried some years ago and there was some question marks in terms of infrastructure, reliability and transit time.. Sea transportation was tried a few times and found out that due to long and unreliable transit times it is coasted much more than expected.. Intermodal was seemed the optimum that we should try together with the proper equipment which meets the requirements. Two options have been tried.. the first one was Rail &sea by using universal sea containers..and then the second option is road&rail intermodal shipments by swap bodies...

4- Implementation of Intermodal System

Due to the long distance between Turkey and European suppliers and requiring to have a stabile transit time and robust material flow, there was no room to stand with irregular or fluctuated flow on high production volume especially due to the delays at the borders or the gates because of some formalities and road restrictions on the way of crossing countries.. There was a need of having stabile and continuous flow in order to feed production on time.. and also there shouldn't be any interruption due to wheatear conditions.. However road transportation is effected too much from wheater conditions in the winter time... or heavy traffic occurs on the roads and Ro-Ro’s during the tourist seasons in the summer time.. So in order to stabilize the effect of the long distance, of course after having too many trails, intermodal mode with ROAD & RAIL transportation is seemed to be the best solution for our traffic..

Environmental issues were another important item for our decision to find environmental friendly transport mode.. First of all as a human being this should be our aim to find a way not to harm human life and also being the leading company in Turkey, we thought that we have to be a leading company for others. Of course, the restriction on road transportation and additional increase on trailer price due to environment protection were the other effects to select intermodal shipment by train,

After deciding to go intermodal transportation, the share of this transportation mode has started to increase gradually year over year... Last year Rail transportation ratio was almost 60% of total shipments.. and we are planning to increase this share up to 65% in this year.

the benefit of this system in terms of cost is approximately 15% comparing with Trailer transportation..

See the Powerpoint presentation

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