Solistica integrated Colombia’s renowned logistics company Operaciones Nacionales de Mercadeo (Open Market) in 2016, looking to expand its network in Latin America.
With this evolution, Solistica became the 3PL supplier with the highest standards in Colombia and Latin America, embracing quality in all its processes, technologies, and operational capacities by using its expertise for designing logistics solutions.
Solistica is a company of FEMSA, which creates financial and social value in Latin America through companies and institutions such as OXXO, Cruz Verde drugstores, Coca Cola, and Heineken. Solistica has more than four thousand clients, 442,000 square meters of warehouses, and employs over 21,000 people in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States.
Solistica’s knowledge, coverage, and reach allows it to guarantee its services, lower costs, and offer complete visibility on the supply chains to face the challenges and complexity of the Latin American and Colombian models.
Because of this transformation, Colombian companies in diverse sectors – for instance, food and beverage, automotive parts, electronics, publishing, home products, retail, textile, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and personal hygiene – have improved their supply chains and efficiently met the needs of domestic and foreign clients by offering them value services, such as:
- Warehousing: handling of goods and control of inventories including coverage, dedicated or multiple-client facilities, dry and multiple-temperature warehouses, handling of high-priced of special-requirements merchandise, inventory management systems, connectivity with other information technologies, control of inventories, flexibility in schedules and operation, and bonded warehouse. These are some of the services offered by the company:
- Inventory Tracking: optimizes inventories in consignment by a continuous re-supply of products according to the demand and level of service; this helps avoid overstocking, understocking, and keep outdated products low.
- Validate: Ensures the verification of the right conditions for temperature and humidity throughout the whole supply chain.
- Green: Ensures we meet the legal requirements and the environmental and post-sales techniques using the highest quality standards on destruction processes.
- Procurement: A specialized service focusing on efficiently and timely obtaining the materials needed by our clients, lowering the costs of the purchasing process.
- Freeze: Ensures the handling and control of pharmaceutical and hospital products through a comprehensive management of the cold chain.
- Value-Added: These services offer extra value, such as outsourced manufacturing, heat shrink, coding and cartoning, labeling, packing, kitting, validation, reverse logistics, refurbishing, and palletizing of the different types of finished pharmaceutical products: hormones, oncology drugs, biological products, diagnostic reagents, medical devices, cosmetics, and nutritional products.
- Distribution: Consolidation of orders as per the specific requirements of each cargo, including coverage, meeting the delivery deadlines, visibility, proof of delivery, risks management, cold chain management, itemized delivery, attention to which cargos can be placed next to each other, and cross docking.
- Transport: FTL fleet management, including meeting deadlines, visibility of the cargo, reports of operation’s indicators, cold chain management, multimodal transportation, connectivity with other information technologies, design of special routes, and design of specialized vehicles.
- Vehicle Maintenance: With Mecánica TEK, a subsidiary of Solistica, we provide fleet maintenance services, including choosing and designing the fleet; preventive, predictive, and corrective maintenance; fixed and mobile 24/7 garages; garages at our clients’ facilities; OEM parts; and customized plans.
- Digital Platforms: Open Market created Data Pack, a software used to automate the whole outsourced manufacturing process, labeling, kitting, changes in presentation, coding, heat seal, heat shrink, repackaging, and revisions, among other services. It also offers other leading applications to check issues such as traceability, orders management, and end-to-end visibility of warehousing activities looking to offer clients control and a continuous monitoring of productivity and service.
Open Market, now known as Solistica, has certifications like ISO 39001:2012, which assesses the road management system; ISO 9001:2008, which rates the performance and efficiency of customer service; OHSAS 18001:2007, overseeing the safety and health at work system; ISO 14001:2004, regarding Bogota’s environmental management; the Environmental Excellence Program; and the Best Practices in Innovation Seal (ISO 2800:2008).
Thanks to this merger, Solistica has become one of the largest and most important 3PL companies in Colombia and Latin America.
Success Story in Colombia | True limitless deliveries
Thanks to its 35 years of experience in Colombia, Open Market – now known as Solistica – has been delivering urgent orders in time and form, overcoming any geographical and accessibility challenges, always with a commitment to bring solutions to any place they are needed.
This is the case of Baxter, a global company offering healthcare products and services, which needed to send a renal treatment to a patient in Sogamoso, Colombia.
The trip included a 12-hour horse ride (six hours each way) carrying 20 cases weighing 20 kilos each. Because of the size of the load, two horses were needed.
Even though Baxter had previously trained Open Market’s team for this kind of delivery, the employee chosen to complete this delivery had never rode a horse before so he was quickly taught how to do it so he could complete his important mission, delivering the treatment in time so the patient could avoid blood poisoning.
Despite the bad weather conditions and the winding, muddy, and slippery roads, the delivery was completed following Baxter’s protocol. This trip was the first phase of the treatment, other options and methods were explored for the next. This was a learning experience for other deliveries involving similar circumstances and roads.
Stories like this help us remember that Open Market’s mission, now known as Solistica, is to be flexible and have empathy to create and adapt creative and customized solutions for delivery, whether by plane, ship, train, truck… or horse.
Solistica is a new way for understanding logistics, consolidating international operations under a sole brand with the main goal of innovating and making the best use of the most advanced technologies, looking to offer solutions that make processes more simple, lower costs, and increase visibility.
