Weathering seasonal surges with coverage and savings

The client

The challenge

When consumer demand for beverages skyrocketed in 2021, this global bottler struggled to find reliable capacity to keep up with the additional volume. Their transportation teams were left scrambling to secure capacity through the spot market, which was often more costly and unpredictable.

The outcome

By activating the Convoy Dynamic Backup API in their transportation management system (TMS), the bottler optimized shipping costs through real-time, competitive rates delivered directly to their routing guide and accessed consistent, high-quality coverage with guaranteed tender acceptance.

Convoy solution:

• Dynamic Backup

Need a drink—or thousands of drinks? This multinational bottler has you covered—and Convoy has them covered with Dynamic Backup.

From beverage to bottle

Stakes are high when you’re among the top three bottlers for one of the world’s largest beverage producers. In addition to keeping your finger on the pulse of consumer preferences, there’s also a need to monitor product availability, trucking capacity, and transportation budgets to fulfill demand.

The bottler is a global leader in the production and distribution of food and beverage products and operates in 18 countries. Their U.S. operations span more than 45 states and fulfills nearly 20% of one of the world’s largest beverage producer’s U.S. bottler-delivered distribution volume.

To ensure the right beverages are delivered to the right facilities at the right time, the bottler uses the BluJay Transportation Management System (TMS), which is now part of connected supply chain platform e2open. The cloudbased TMS enables them to quickly and efficiently manage their freight operations, including freight procurement.

From sip to surge

Consumer demand for refreshments surged in 2021. The bottler needed to fire on all cylinders to get beverages from production facilities to distribution centers so they could land at consumer destinations and experiences including grocery stores, restaurants, sporting events, and music festivals.

But finding reliable capacity that could keep up with consumer demand was tough.

Food and beverage producers across the U.S. struggled to find carriers able and willing to transport additional volume. Carriers they did secure reneged on their contracts, leaving transportation teams scrambling to find often last-minute, unpredictable, and expensive capacity on the spot market.

Backup at the ready

The bottler knew they needed reliable coverage that could flex up and down with demand for their product—at a moment’s notice—in tight markets and in soft markets.

They decided to activate the Dynamic Backup API on their TMS. Competitive, real-time rates were inserted directly into their routing guide with no manual intervention needed. If a Dynamic Backup rate was shown for a shipment, transportation teams knew they could lock in that rate with guaranteed tender acceptance.

It was nice to have that dependability. Knowing Convoy would accept 100% of the tenders that came to them was one less thing to worry about.”

Senior Logistics Operations Manager, global bottling company

Since 2021, the bottler has completed more than 500 shipments with 100% tender acceptance by using Dynamic Backup.

Savings with market softening

As the U.S. full truckload market softened in early 2022, the bottler was among the first shippers to immediately save on their transportation costs. Dynamic Backup’s realtime rates automatically adjusted to market conditions to help them initially save on more than 150 lanes and continue to do so across additional lanes.