Success is often measured in terms of a company’s size and reach. Yet the bigger a company becomes, the more difficult it can be to effectively manage data flow from multiple sources.
EV Cargo Technology was recently approached by a British multinational retail company with just such problems.
Headquartered in London the company has regional offices located across the UK, France, Poland and Romania, over 1300 stores in nine countries, and includes a number of major DIY and home improvement brands in its portfolio.
Its existing system involved multiple business units, all working in silos and with similar processes, managing international supply chain data separately. As a result, the company found there was no simple way to extract and centralise the data, and undue reliance on its 3PL provided system.
This threw up significant business challenges when moving or adding a new 3PL and a lack of visibility of cost exposure across the group.
Working with EV Cargo Technology, the company identified three key goals to be addressed: single visibility platform across the group; reporting of data across business units; and scalability – the ability to add extra business units as required.
The solution was EV Cargo Technology’s Single Global Visibility logistics system, with data captured across order, shipment and delivery processes.
This is a proven solution which provides a consistent and streamlined approach, viewing and reporting of data across business units. In this particular case, EV Cargo Technology’s logistics system helped manage more than 35,000 containers and trailers across 1,000 different suppliers and 53,600 order numbers (of which 32,500 individual SKUs were shipped).
On top of this nearly 2 million cubic metres of goods, which had been sitting in the global visibility tool system, were moved across five banners and two forwarders, utilising 21 different carriers.
The impact of EV Cargo Technology’s Single Global Visibility logistics system has been a reduction in general operating costs due to increased process automation, a reduction in inventory because of stock clearance, and, crucially, reduction in logistics spend thanks to improved route optimisation and shipment management.