For more than three years, Emmelibri has relied on Manhattan SCALE to supply bookstores in Italy. The warehouse management system has led to savings in time and costs, allowing Italy’s largest wholesaler of books, to constantly adapt its operation to its ever-changing marketplace.

 

Emmelibri has a rich history in books dating back almost 110 years and today, more than 800 publishing houses trust the company to distribute their books across the whole of Italy. As a result, one in two Italian books comes from one of its warehouses in northern Italy. “Being in the market for such a long time, means that we have experienced all the major transformations that the book industry has undergone over the last century, and we have survived these transformations, maintaining or position as a leader in the distribution of books in Italy,” says Pino Omodei Salè, responsible for Emmelibri’s business applications.

 

Operational excellence

Book distribution is one of Emmelibri’s two lines of business. For that, the company uses a warehouse of over 80,000 square metres in Stradella. The other business unit concerns Emmelibri’s wholesale arm, which supplies bookshops throughout the country with a complete range of books. This takes place from a 15,000-squaremetre warehouse in Carpiano.

The emphasis in both warehouses is on operational excellence, Omodei Salé says. “Being a leader means having a focus on innovation and being strongly committed to servicing our customers.

We are aware of their needs and know that their turnover depends on our performance, punctuality, speed and accuracy. For this reason, technology innovation is key to making our logistical operations more effective and efficient.” This access to technology innovation is one of the reasons why the warehouse in Carpiano runs on the Manhattan SCALE warehouse management system. “As a leader in our industry we wanted to have the best solution available in the market and Manhattan is recognised as the leader in the WMS market. In addition to that, Manhattan also showed its commitment to us by opening an office in Italy with local consultants and support.”

 

 

“With scale, we are able to adapt our warehouse operations to the new challenges posed by this continuously changing market.”
Pino Omodei Salè, Director of Application Developments

 

 

Saving time and costs

One of the advantages to Manhattan’s SCALE solution lies in the architecture of the system and the ability to configure the system to Emmelibri’s needs. “That was one of the problems we had with our previous warehouse management system. The system was not adaptable enough and could not be adjusted to our evolving business needs.”

Omodei Salé stresses that books are a heavy product which causes logistical issues in itself. “The handling and transport of books needs to be extremely effective and efficient. With SCALE, we have been able to adapt a number of logistics processes, saving time and costs. For example, the implementation of batch picking, and business rules allow us to free up space and make better use of the available stock. SCALE contains a wealth of functionality that we continue to use to achieve our main objective of becoming a more efficient and cost-effective operation.”

Thanks to SCALE, Omodei has no worries about the future. “We have already experienced many disruptions in the history of this company, such as the launch of book sales in supermarkets and Amazon’s entry into the Italian market. In the future we will see many more changes in products and sales channels, but with SCALE, we will be able to adapt our warehouse operations to the new challenges posed by this continuously changing marketplace.”

 

 

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