Mileno Carvalho, engineer for Industrial Planning at Baterias Moura, says that Moura has launched several strategies to obtain a 40% reduction in the costs for storage, freight and demurrage.

For him, the success in the reduction of logistics costs at Baterias Moura is due, above all, to the creation of a specific committee for the area. “We gathered five departments to simulate some scenarios in the company, identify problems and look for solutions”, he says. Baterias Moura has four industrial plants in Pernambuco and one in São Paulo, besides its own distribution network covering the whole of Brazil and in countries in South America, Central America and Europe. The import of inputs and the export of products are part of the routine of the company, that uses of trucks and ships for cargo transportation.

The cost reduction committee has developed a positive action in the import area: to request documentation from suppliers beforehand. “We identified a little mishap in the import process with respect to the documentation, which increased the costs for the company. The inputs arrived in Brazil and sometimes the documentation was incomplete or had mistakes from the suppliers, so the product were retained in Customs until everything was corrected. In the meantime, while waiting, we had to pay for the storage and demurrage of the container with the material”, he says. The anticipation of the documentation contributed greatly for cost reduction, because if there is any mistake in the documentation, it is corrected before the input arrives in Brazil.

Another operation by the committee that had a positive effect was what the company calls “joint freight”. “We analyzed a way of combining the date of receipt of the inputs with the distribution of the batteries in order to reduce freight costs. Now the container comes from the harbor with inputs and returns to the harbor with batteries”, he explains.