A DCS Vendor Starts Selling Container Logistics Software

Yokogawa Electric has signed a distribution agreement with the French company BuyCo to offer BuyCo's transportation management system to materials industry customers. On the surface it is a reseller deal; underneath it is a statement about where plant optimisation is expected to stop, which is apparently no longer at the fence line.

BuyCo's software-as-a-service platform centralises container transport data, plans shipments, visualises shipping operations in real time and provides door-to-door tracking based on cargo data. The platform has more than 12,000 users worldwide. Yokogawa states the aim is integrated optimisation spanning customers' production operations through to international logistics, with Naohisa Endo, executive officer and head of the Materials Business Headquarters, quoted on that goal, and BuyCo founder and chief executive Carl Lauron describing the partnership as closing the gap between production and logistics.

The drivers cited are the ones any materials producer would list: rising supply chain complexity, geopolitical risk, stricter environmental regulation, rising transport costs and greenhouse gas emissions management. The last of those is quietly the most demanding, because emissions accounting across an outbound shipping chain requires cargo-level data that production systems and logistics systems have historically held in different places and different units.

The engineering question this raises is scheduling. A production plan built without visibility of container availability, vessel schedules and port congestion is optimised against a fiction, and the classic failure is a plant that hits its production targets and then fills its warehouse because the goods cannot move. Closing that loop means the scheduling system needs shipping data as an input rather than a downstream consequence — which is a genuine integration project, not a portal.

Whether a control vendor is the right party to sell it is a fair question, though Yokogawa's answer is implicit: it already sits inside the production systems that would have to consume the data. The company employs more than 18,000 people across 136 companies in 63 countries.