Gebrüder Weiss is one of Europe’s oldest and most respected transport and logistics companies — a family-owned business with roots reaching back over 500 years, today operating with approximately 8,000 employees across 180 company-owned locations in 35 countries. Working across land transport, air and sea freight, and logistics solutions, Gebrüder Weiss combines the scale of a global provider with the operational discipline of a company that has survived five centuries of logistics evolution.

Among its enterprise customers is 3M, whose EMEA supply chain moves goods from factories through a network of third-party logistics hubs to customers in more than 30 countries. Gebrüder Weiss operates reconstruction hubs for 3M in Austria and Hungary — receiving consolidated inbound freight, breaking it down, and rebuilding customer-specific shipments for final distribution across Central and Eastern Europe.

When 3M standardised its European logistics network on the MIXMOVE HUB OS platform, the Gebrüder Weiss hubs became part of that programme — with a distinctive starting point: the reconstruction process was already running, but it was running manually.

Gebrüder Weiss’s position at the start of the MIXMOVE partnership was unusual compared to other 3M network partners. The Austria hub was already performing the reconstruction process 3M required — approximately two full truckloads daily, more than 2,000 boxes, up to 200 different consignees, all processed and shipped the same day. The operation worked. But it worked because experienced operators made it work, using internal systems and manual coordination that had grown organically around the task.

That model carried three structural problems. First, compliance: 3M required every network partner to run the standardised MIXMOVE process, with the same data structures, KPI reporting, and real-time visibility as DHL and DSV hubs — and the internal Gebrüder Weiss systems could not provide that alignment. Second, transparency: 3M’s network operations team had only limited EDI-based visibility into what was happening inside the Austrian and Hungarian hubs. Third, sustainability of the model itself: a process dependent on individual operator knowledge, rather than system intelligence, is difficult to scale, difficult to audit, and vulnerable to staff change.

The transition also carried a real IT challenge: integrating MIXMOVE HUB OS with both Gebrüder Weiss’s internal infrastructure and 3M’s EDI systems required rigorous testing of all processes, IT structures, and message flows — within a live operation that could not stop.

MIXMOVE HUB OS was deployed across Gebrüder Weiss’s Austria and Hungary hubs, connecting to 3M’s systems via EDI integration and replacing manual reconstruction coordination with intelligent, rule-based execution.

On the hub floor, the transformation was direct: twenty operators now use MIXMOVE HUB OS on PDA devices to guide reconstruction and sorting — every box scanned, every movement directed by the system, every action captured digitally. Eight further staff use the platform for administration, rules configuration, settings, and planning, aligning the hub’s operating parameters with 3M’s network standards.

The deployment aligned administration, rules, settings, and planning configurations with 3M’s systems — making the Austria and Hungary hubs fully compliant nodes in 3M’s standardised European network, with the same real-time visibility and KPI reporting as every other MIXMOVE-operated hub. The implementation experience — in particular the need to map physical warehouse processes and IT architecture in full before deployment — became a reference point for subsequent hub rollouts in the 3M network.