Interview of Diego Napoletano, EMEA Logistics & Distribution Manager, Cernusco, Italy.
Have you ever wondered how Ingenico terminals get from A to B? With operations of significant scale involving goods where security is of utmost importance, the highest standards are required. Ingenico established a Logistics Excellence Hub in Cernusco, Italy, ensuring that efficiency, cost-effectiveness and the shortest lead times are achieved while payment security remains paramount. In this interview, Diego Napoletano, EMEA Logistics & Distribution Manager, shares with us the best practice of running an Excellence Hub and what goes on backstage.
Diego, what is Ingenico’s ‘Logistics Excellence Hub’ and how does it support the EMEA region? Can you describe the range and scale of services carried out there?
The Logistics Hub is, first of all, a successful and exciting story, made possible thanks to the professionalism, passion and experience of the people working in and around it.
The Cernusco site is one of two EMEA distribution centres, covering the vast majority of EMEA countries (Italy, France, DACH, Benelux, Eastern Europe and MEA). It includes a warehouse of over 6,000 square metres, with over 3,400 pallet places. On average, we handle the shipment of 9,000 terminals and 400 deliveries per day.
On average, we handle the shipment of 9,000 terminals per day.
The Cernusco Hub today is specialised in terminal logistics. Terminals arrive from the factories in Brazil, China and Vietnam through air and sea shipments. Then they are customised according to customers’ needs, injected with secure keys in our PCI-certified Secure Room, and then shipped to customers.
Thanks to the Hub we’re able to maximise the consolidation of goods belonging to different countries, both for the inbound and outbound flow, with an optimised freight cost.
In this short video we show the journey of our terminals at the Logistics Excellence Hub in Cernusco, Italy. From the inbound arrival of the terminal, through to customisation and shipping to our customers.
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Can you share with us the key factors that ensure success at the Hub?
- Motivation and ownership. The logistics team based at Cernusco includes 15 internal employees and around 60 subcontractors, dedicated to reception, planning, warehousing, customisation and deliveries. However, the end-to-end logistics process includes both local and remote people. It involves collection of the demand in the destination country and transfer to the Hub. Then preparation of the goods and, finally, delivery to customers. As a Centre of Excellence, we’re always keen to keep our people motivated, develop skills, encourage talents and create the right environment. The team is involved in several projects in EMEA, where the Hub often plays a central role.
- Flexibility is fundamental for success in such a complex context, where we have many customers and countries with different needs. One of my main challenges has been to build a cohesive environment, with one big EMEA team aiming at the same objectives. The Hub makes it easier, thanks to the strong connections between all the countries and teams linked to it.
- Standardisation and process improvement are key priorities, and we have people dedicated to spread lean culture in the Hub, apply visual management principles, set up KPIs to measure our performance and take the right actions to improve. We’re currently focused on standardisation of the software loading process in all our customisation centres in EMEA, as well as on reduction of all intermediate stops in the delivery process to customers to reduce our lead time.
The covid pandemic and supply chain issues must have caused challenges. What has been their long-term impact on the Logistics Excellence Hub?
Our operational world faced critical and unexpected changes over the last 3 years. Besides the safety constraints, we were challenged by a global crisis in the supply chain. The input from our factories was evolving daily, based on the availability of materials. It was unpredictable to say how many goods were left to receive, to customise, and to ship...
When I look back, we have certainly improved our forward-thinking approach to better anticipate and adapt in advance to an evolving context. Today we’re comfortable operating as a very dynamic organisation, with new solutions to implement and exciting targets to achieve.
What are your key priorities for the Hub as Ingenico rolls out new products, services and solutions, including AXIUM and Terminal as a Service (TaaS)?
Deploying a new product family is no exception to our Excellence standards. AXIUM, the new Android terminal range of Ingenico, meets the same level of standards of quality and lead time, and we implemented the tools needed and trained people accordingly.
Terminal as a Service (TaaS) is a complete solution including hardware and services, which reflects the digital transformation Ingenico is pursuing at the operational level. Our TaaS offer requires strong operational execution and continued cost improvements. This is challenging the way logistics is traditionally managed as we strive to improve our operational efficiency, and this represents a new stimulating target for the Hub. I’m excited to be part of it. Serving our customers with Excellence has always been our priority and with TaaS, we will take operations to the next level.
