Transport and logistics

Our environmental performance is also affected by the vehicles that transport deliveries to and from our production plants as well as by our employees’ commutes, all of which consume resources and cause emissions and noise. We are minimizing these emissions by optimizing the logistics systems involved and by using rail and ship transport. Whenever feasible, we are increasingly replacing business trips with conference calls and video or online conferences. Employees working in Sindelfingen and Stuttgart receive discounted yearly passes for the public transit system.

We are centrally monitoring all truck shipments to our plants in Germany and in Vitoria, Spain. We can estimate the amount of CO₂ emitted, based on the tonnage and the number of kilometers driven per truck (handbook on emission factors for road traffic, HBEFA 2.1).

In a scientific study concluded in 2010, we examined how we can better combine our supplier shipments so that we can reduce emissions and costs by keeping the number of deliveries as low as possible in trucks that are more efficiently used than before. The pilot locations chosen for this study were Kassel and the Global Logistics Center (GLC) in Germersheim. These two facilities alone receive over 81,000 parts from more than 1,500 suppliers located in 40 supply regions throughout Europe. The task of optimizing these shipments was therefore very complex, particularly since deliveries also had to be organized in line with production requirements, which means that shipments have to be received just in time and just in sequence in order to keep storage needs to a minimum.

As a result, Daimler Research in Ulm cooperated for many years with the logistics experts at the two pilot facilities, the University of Paderborn, and a specialized software company to develop the Webbased Supply Network Optimizer (webSNO). Thanks to this system, the number of truck shipments to the two project locations was reduced by around 27,800 trips in 2010 alone. This cut the total distance covered by 2.6 million kilometers and eliminated about 2,300 tons of CO₂ emissions. Because the Optimizer cut CO₂ emissions by a relative amount of 35 percent and reduced costs by 11 percent during the project, the system will probably substantially reduce emissions, costs, and traffic when it is introduced in other production plants.