An inno­v­a­tive con­tain­er load and unload sys­tem is reaping
enor­mous div­i­dends for an Aus­tri­an ski lift manufacturer’s
glob­al trans­port bot­tom line. 

The background

Aus­tri­an-based firm Dop­pel­mayr Seil­bah­nen is the world mar­ket leader in build­ing rope­way con­struc­tions, per­haps the best-known exam­ple of which is the ski lift. With 14,900 rope­way instal­la­tions in 95 coun­tries around the world, the com­pa­ny sends out an aver­age of 800–1.000 FCL con­tain­er loads from Aus­tria each year. 

Dop­pel­mayr uses open-top con­tain­ers for all projects because the rope­way poles are up to 10m long and up to 20t in weight. This can be a
trou­ble­some issue, though – open­top con­tain­ers are often hard to source as well as between €600 and €1000 more expen­sive in cost than a reg­u­lar seafreight con­tain­er. A fur­ther com­pli­ca­tion is that the load­ing and unload­ing of each con­tain­er is both labour-inten­sive and time-con­sum­ing because the prod­ucts are so heavy and hard to handle.

The solu­tion

After research­ing the mar­ket for a solu­tion to reduce or abol­ish alto­geth­er
the need for open-top con­tain­ers for their trans­port, Dop­pel­mayr man­agers
were intro­duced to the SIMPLY. con­tain­er load­ing sys­tem. This machine
is able to load a full stan­dard sea con­tain­er of up to 35t in weight in just a
sin­gle lift. The whole load­ing process is com­plet­ed in 10 minutes.

The SIMPLY. works like a huge auto­mat­ic pump-truck and is very easy to install. All the freight can be prepicked and secured on the SIMPLY. before the con­tain­er arrives. The only exter­nal fac­tors need­ed for instal­la­tion and oper­at­ing are air-pres­sure and an elec­tri­cal connection.

After a crit­i­cal appraisal of the system’s capa­bil­i­ties, they ordered one SIMPLY. for their plant in Wol­furt. When the first con­tain­ers where loaded with the SIMPLY. the team was huge­ly real­ly  enthused by the quick and easy sys­tem. This soon led to the deci­sion to order a sec­ond SIMPLY. for a very big project in La Paz, Bolivia. This SIMPLY. was for unload­ing hun­dreds of con­tain­ers com­ing from the Wol­furt site.

The out­come

After the big suc­cess­es at Wol­furt and La Paz Dop­pel­mayr then ordered more SIMPLY’s for many dif­fer­ent projects all over the world. They cur­rent­ly oper­ate 10 SIMPLY.’s in dif­fer­ent coun­tries, and are thus able to use the sys­tem for just about every con­tain­er they have to load or unload.

The SIMPLY. con­tain­er sys­tem has total­ly changed Doppelmayr’s logis­tics process. From a posi­tion where it was com­pli­cat­ed and cost­ly to load and unload hun­dreds of open-top con­tain­ers per year, they now have a sav­ing of over €600k per annum in regard to trans­port charges alone. This of course is before you add the time and labour sav­ings made dur­ing the load­ing and unload­ing process.

www.simply-logistic.com