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 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.

Getting Started with Dynamic Backup

New to Convoy? Get a demo and learn more about shipping with us. Let’s talk.

Already ship with Convoy? Get in touch with your account manager.

More on how dynamic pricing helps shippers

• In our webinar, Adapting to Freight Market Softening, learn how industry-leading shippers are driving innovation with dynamic pricing programs while avoiding the inefficient, cumbersome process of renegotiating freight contracts.
• A multinational industrial goods company saved thousands of operational hours and an estimated $400,000 by enabling Dynamic Backup in their TMS. Here’s how Convoy’s backup pricing program made that possible.

The post Weathering Seasonal Surges with Coverage and Savings appeared first on Convoy.

Constant demand, constant shifts

This bottled water brand’s production processes stay agile to fulfill customer demand and drive operational efficiencies. Decisions made on where to bottle and ship their water adjusted on a weekly basis.

As a result, it was difficult to accurately forecast shipment volumes, define pickup facilities and designate drop-off destinations. The importer also experienced seasonal surges during summer months and had high customer expectations to fulfill.

Enter Convoy’s freight services and technology

Shipment needs that were predictable and consistent were low and fulfilled through Convoy primary contracts. Coverage for the majority of the bottled water brand’s volume today is provided via Convoy Dynamic Backup, and loads are tracked via the online shipper platform.

Transportation teams are able to get instant rates and book loads with guaranteed tender acceptance by activating the Dynamic Backup API. They are also able to secure high-quality capacity from Convoy’s digital freight network of more than 400,000 trucks—all powered by 80,000 carriers with higher safety ratings than industry averages.

More flexibility, improved visibility

The bottled water brand has completed nearly 6,000 shipments through the dynamic pricing program since late 2019. Teams also used Convoy’s online shipper platform to track shipments and access PODs and BOLs to verify on-time delivery for their customers.

Performance is improving as a result. Most recently, the bottled water brand reported 95% On-Time Pickup (OTP) for contracted and Dynamic Backup volume during one of their busiest Summer months. 97% of all loads serviced in that same period were delivered on time, continuing to help the brand save significantly by avoiding fines due to missed deliveries.

Ready for market softening

As the U.S. full truckload market continues softening in 2022, the bottled water brand also now has options to consider for low-cost, high-quality coverage. With Dynamic Backup, they can quickly get and compare rates to secure cost-effective coverage. They are also paying an average lower rate-per-lane than they would on the spot market, even in soft market conditions.

Today, Convoy is the premium water bottled water brand’s top API carrier. Trucking costs are optimized in real-time to ensure quality coverage at rates in-tune with the market.

The bottled water brand is also partnering with Convoy’s Shipper Insights team to explore ways to enhance performance monitoring beyond shipment tracking. By optimizing their operations across facilities and modes of transportation, there is a shared vision to continue reducing costs and improving service quality.

Getting Started with Dynamic Backup

New to Convoy? Get a demo and learn more about shipping with us. Let’s talk.

Already ship with Convoy? Get in touch with your account manager.

More on how dynamic pricing helps shippers

• In our webinar, Adapting to Freight Market Softening, learn how industry-leading shippers are driving innovation with dynamic pricing programs while avoiding the inefficient, cumbersome process of renegotiating freight contracts.
• A multinational industrial goods company saved thousands of operational hours and an estimated $400,000 by enabling Dynamic Backup in their TMS. Here’s how Convoy’s backup pricing program made that possible.

The post Prepared for the Unpredictable appeared first on Convoy.

The difficulties of spiking shipment volume

As demand for freight spiked in 2021, operations teams found themselves facing waves of canceled shipments. Goods were flying off shelves, including consumer favorites that were high-visibility and high-volume. Many carriers were unable to fulfill spiking volumes well above committed contract volumes. Increased volume hit the spot market as a result. Underperforming lanes remained business critical, but drove up operating costs, and reliable capacity was needed to support peak retail seasons.

Guaranteed tender acceptance to the rescue 

Convoy was already delivering 100% of contracted volume with this retailer. When spikes in volume required even more flexible and reliable capacity, the retailer chose to pilot Guaranteed Primary, designed to minimize shippers’ exposure to volatile spot price markets.

During the pilot, Convoy guaranteed 100% tender acceptance at a fixed 10% margin across 7 out of 26 existing primary lanes. These lanes were experiencing high volume spikes and load cancellations/ tender rejections. Estimated savings through Guaranteed Primary rates were estimated at $1.6 million when compared to standard freight RFP contract rates at the time.

From headache-inducing to high-performing tender acceptance

Within three months, Convoy was able to improve total primary tender acceptance by 88% on the seven lanes chosen for the pilot. While tender rejections increased 105% the month prior to the pilot, the Guaranteed Primary program delivered on its 100% tender acceptance promise, leading to zero spot loads.

High-quality service was also table stakes for Convoy. On-Time-Delivery (OTD) was executed 3% higher than overall primary and 4% higher than overall spot. 

Delivering Guaranteed Freight Coverage

Recognizing the value Guaranteed Primary provides in delivering guaranteed coverage, this retailer continues enrolling additional lanes in the program. Shipment volume grew from 166 to 1,193 from February 2022 to March 2022 alone.

With Convoy, the retailer also gains transparency into shipment costs and is able to take advantage of rates in-tune with the market. Convoy was the first freight provider to offer cost savings to the retailer in 2022 due to seasonality and as signs of market softening emerged.

“[Convoy] was the first carrier to lower rates for us in 2022. This kind of partnership is a game changer for the long run.” —Transportation Director, Fortune 50 Retailer

Getting started with Guaranteed Primary

New to Convoy? Let’s talk about shipping with Convoy and saving more with Guaranteed Primary.

Already ship with Convoy? Get in touch with your account manager.

More on how dynamic pricing helps shippers

• In our webinar, Adapting to Freight Market Softening, learn how industry-leading shippers are driving innovation with dynamic pricing programs while avoiding the inefficient, cumbersome process of renegotiating freight contracts.
• This case study is available for download in PDF format.

The post Taming tough lanes and saving on costs with a Fortune 50 retailer appeared first on Convoy.

Challenges of Predicting the Unpredictable in Freight

A multinational industrial goods company needed to deliver supply chain products to their customers, often within 24 hours’ notice. How much product their customers would need, by when, and to where was often unknown. Adding to the complexity of their operation was the need to also retrieve the products from their customers’ locations and then dynamically route them to servicing centers, stocking locations, or other customers’ operations.

The company recognized the challenges of forecasting their dynamic network and fulfilling their bi-directional transportation needs. Shipments also often needed to be transported at the last minute, on new lanes, to thousands of locations across the United States. Freight RFPs were not a good fit for business operations because volume requirements and lane pairings were often unpredictable. Turning to the spot market for thousands of loads was unsustainable in the long run, requiring immense administrative effort and cost.

Enter Convoy Dynamic Backup

Recognizing the need for coverage at fair rates, the company enabled Convoy’s Dynamic Backup API in their transportation management system (TMS). This unlocked access to instant, elastic capacity at competitive market rates in their routing guide without leaving their TMS and turning to cumbersome spot auctions.

As soon as shipments were added to their system, the company could get an instant quote, lock in the price, and snap up a truck. Instant freight coverage was always one click away as soon as they knew their dedicated and contract carriers couldn’t accept additional loads. Rates for known and new lanes were readily available, eliminating the hassle of contacting and waiting on multiple carriers for contract or spot rates.

Dynamic aining Peace of Mind

More than 40,000 of the company’s loads have been successfully picked up and delivered through Convoy Dynamic Backup since January 2021. During this time, Convoy was able to meet their spiky demand during seasonal and holiday surges, plus flex up to three times their average weekly capacity during surges.

“We recommend our load planners choose Convoy’s dynamic rates whenever possible, rather than doing a spot market auction. We know Convoy will always accept the tender, and they have the best combination of competitive pricing and high quality service.” —Sr. Analyst, Logistics Execution Global Industrials Company

Saving Time and Money

By enabling Convoy Dynamic Backup, the company was able to save an estimated $400,000 since the U.S. full truckload (FTL) market started softening in early 2022 by avoiding the spot market. Transportation teams also saved thousands of operational hours waiting for and negotiating rates for time-sensitive and business-critical freight operations.

As the market continues to soften, the company is able to secure backup coverage—when and where they need it—at competitive rates they wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. Rates are delivered directly to their TMS and come with a 100% tender acceptance guarantee across all market conditions.

Getting Started with Dynamic Backup

New to Convoy? Get a demo and learn more about shipping with us. Let’s talk.

Already ship with Convoy? Get in touch with your account manager.

More on how dynamic pricing helps shippers

• In our webinar, Adapting to Freight Market Softening, learn how industry-leading shippers are driving innovation with dynamic pricing programs while avoiding the inefficient, cumbersome process of renegotiating freight contracts.
• This case study is available for download in PDF format.

The post Dynamic Rates for a Dynamic Network appeared first on Convoy.

Executing automotive freight is hard. Assembly plants run on little inventory and need just-in-time deliveries. Inbound trucks often have multiple stops at suppliers before their final destination. The freight can be high-value and often must be handled with care. And great visibility data is crucial to measuring carrier performance and supplier efficiency.

The truckload carriers that run automotive freight tend to specialize in it and offer dedicated capacity solutions that can become embedded on very regular, repetitive lanes. That can make it hard for non-asset transportation providers to break into those verticals, and some might think that the particular requirements of the commodities might make them unsuited for digital freight brokerage in particular.

But when Faurecia, the French tier-one auto parts supplier, wanted to simplify its North American transportation network, reduce cost and improve service, it turned to Convoy’s automotive practice group.

“What we’re trying to do is reduce our panel and use fewer carriers and suppliers across the globe,” said Brian Mapes, a commodity buyer in transportation and logistics at Faurecia. “In that process, we selected Convoy because it doesn’t make sense for us to have one lane awarded to a small carrier and have 100 carriers set up across our network.”

As Faurecia whittled down its North American routing guide to a group of 30 core transportation providers, it awarded Convoy freight out of its Blue Springs plant (Kansas City, Missouri) and its Spring Hill plant (Nashville, Tennessee). Convoy matched capacity for both truckload and so-called milk runs, in which Convoy’s carrier would make pickups at multiple facilities before delivering to an original equipment manufacturer’s (OEM’s) assembly line.

“Our customers expect the freight to be ready at the OEM plant with no shortages and no quality defects,” Mapes said. “They run these plants on very little inventory, so the on-time piece is huge for us. A route that is a couple hours late is probably going to shut a line down. For us, cost is number 1, on-time percentage is number 2, and we haven’t really had any problems in terms of damage or missing freight.”

Convoy is the only digital freight network with a dedicated automotive practice group, which includes operations people solely focused on the auto industry and business development representatives with decades of experience working with auto parts suppliers. Conner Olson, senior enterprise account manager at Convoy, leads the automotive group, which now has several major customers, including the world’s largest global automakers.

Olson said that automotive’s typically static schedules allow Convoy to plan weeks ahead and drive down the cost of trucking capacity in its network and that Convoy’s ability to use its batching technology to offer round trips to carriers made the return of racks and custom packaging to parts suppliers much more efficient. But as streamlined and rationalized as automotive supply chains can be, there will always be surge freight that doesn’t work well with dedicated assets.

“If you ask a Faurecia or other automotive shippers what their carrier makeup is, it’s largely asset-based,” Olson explained. “We do those contract lanes, but one of the unique things we’ve been able to solve for is that long tail of their freight network — the excess freight. We’ve been able to play really well there for ad hoc style shipments and loads with less than one move per week. It’s not always transactional. We contract out those lanes and have launched our new Guaranteed Primary program, where we provide dynamic rates for primary freight, and we’re able to address those needs.”

Consistent, high-quality visibility data has allowed Faurecia to analyze the performance of its own facilities, measure dwell times and adjust how parts are routed to OEMs so that they arrive on time.

“The visibility tools are pretty key,” Mapes said. “Convoy is further ahead in the game than a lot of legacy providers in terms of geofencing and being able to show you detention or if someone is getting held up. Convoy also ranks which plants and suppliers are doing well.”

“We help with the optimization of the route,” Olson added. “We can suggest removing a stop if a supplier is holding the load up from getting delivered or look at a few other stops along the way. Those recommendations can be seen in our monthly business review data and at the end of the day, it’s about driving our customer’s cost and our cost down.”

Another way that Convoy helps keep Faurecia’s freight running smoothly, Mapes said, is by paying carriers quickly and accurately. Convoy QuickPay’s generous payment terms — paying carriers in two business days with no fees — helps small trucking companies with their cash flow and drives carrier stickiness on complex but regular automotive lanes where familiarity matters.

Convoy already works with, but Olson said there’s an opportunity to go much deeper with the OEM’s supplier networks and that his automotive practice is “just scratching the surface” of a vast industry.

“Automotive has become one of our core competencies, although we haven’t really put it out there yet,” Olson said. “It’s exciting to see the auto industry transform.”

The post How Faurecia leverages Convoy’s automotive practice group appeared first on Convoy.

This case study was originally published on FreightWaves.
If you like this story, you’ll love our other Shipper Testimonials.

While COVID-19 brought doom for some retailers, it was a boon for others. Forced lockdowns drove consumers to buy less apparel and more home decor, gym equipment and, believe it or not, toys for kids. 

By September, toy industry revenue surged 19%, a figure excluding peak holiday season, which usually accounts for 40% of the toy industry’s revenue. Parents seem to be assuaging the world’s uncertainty and school closures by filling their children’s daily lives with colorful and educational distractions. Because of that, toy manufacturers like Joyin are seeing revenues more than double. 

“Our bestselling Klever Kits (arts and crafts brand) item, surprisingly, is sidewalk chalk,” said Phoebe Chang, national sales manager at Joyin. “People just have nothing to do, so they have looked to us to provide some entertainment for them. We have a lot of seasonal and nonseasonal arts and crafts kits — everything from how to make your own soap or paint your own unicorn set. We launch a new product every day.”

In 2019, Joyin ⁠— a North American third-party seller to major retailers ⁠— brought in $60 million in revenue, and in 2020, it more than doubled that, bringing in $140 million. Since April, Joyin has added 1,000 items to its catalog, making its current inventory 3,000 items. While the bulk of its sales move through Amazon, Joyin products are also available on Wayfair.com, Target.com, Kroger.com, Bedbathandbeyond.com, Walmart.com and Etsy. In 2021, Joyin hopes to expand its product lines and distributions from predominantly e-commerce to in-store retail. 

But for Joyin, the story of its 2020 growth is more nuanced than being at the right place at the right time. 

In 2018, Joyin’s shipping platform couldn’t keep up with its shifting inventory and rapid growth. So it partnered with Convoy, which provides a shipping platform offering shippers real-time 24/7 visibility into the status of each shipment and ensures 94.9% on-time pickup with Convoy’s carrier network. The facility ratings Convoy provides drive the operational feedback loop for carriers, and Joyin rates highly at 4.9 out of 5. 

“Tracking each shipment from start to finish is what we value the most with Convoy, since a lot of our product is seasonal,” said Chang. “Having an on-time shipment and enough trucks for Amazon, especially with COVID, is super important right now. If we miss one week or even one or two days, we might miss out on Amazon’s whole peak selling season. We have warehouses in so many different places, so we’ve got to make sure we’re able to track all that with GPS data.” 

Approaching the Easter holiday in 2020, Amazon temporarily prohibited third-party sellers from shipping and storing nonessential goods at its warehouses, but the data from Convoy’s platform allowed Joyin to analyze the previous year’s shipments and make efficient decisions in light of these new limitations. 

The partnership with Convoy has provided Joyin a convenient and user-friendly online one-stop-shop experience to quote, book, manage bills and track shipments. That supports ⁠— rather than hinders ⁠— the company’s growth. The visibility that 24/7 tracking provides and the privilege online-only retailers enjoy of immediate real-time sales analytics allow Joyin to pivot quickly ⁠— no matter the disruption. 

“Our design cycle is very, very quick,” said Chang. “Our turnaround time is two months. So two months before whatever holiday it is, we can still design something for it. We know exactly what we did wrong right after the season ends, and we just have to do better next year, essentially.”

With the help of Convoy’s data and analytics, Joyin was able to pivot its strategy away from bulk party goods in 2020 and adapt its strategy for Halloween. The designers for Joyin’s Halloween line, Spooktacular Creations, decided to expand the inflatable costume Puff-Me-Up Collection geared toward socially distanced trick-or-treaters: prepackaged Halloween goody bags to leave at the front door for safe sharing with friends and neighbors. 

Just as arts-and-crafts kits took off in sales, Joyin’s premium home decor brand, Joiedomi, also grew a lot in the last year as homeowners are investing more time and money in decorating their homes. 

Besides the visibility that Convoy’s centralized platform provides, another secret to this lightning-speed turnaround is keeping everything in house. Joyin has its own designers, product managers and even an office in China that helps with sourcing, purchasing and acquiring container capacity. Joyin still relies on a third party to manage its four warehouses, but COVID-19 has left those warehouses short-staffed. Chang hopes that in 2021 Joyin will take ownership of that aspect of its supply chain as well. 

“Logistics is definitely our key concern right now,” said Chang. “After last year’s company review, we realized that we can actually sell more if we were to be more efficient in terms of transportation and logistics planning. As we try to expand into stores, Convoy will come in handy because that’s when we have to deliver a lot of tight on-time shipments. It’s good that we’re using Convoy right now to learn all of its features that we can potentially use in the future.”

The post Toy seller Joyin’s 2020 boom offers lessons in agility appeared first on Convoy.

Owens Corning (NYSE: OC), the global manufacturer of building materials and fiberglass composites, has embraced cultural and digital transformation as the company seeks to do business in a more inclusive and forward-thinking way.

Owens Corning’s workers, products and facilities span 33 countries, from Canada to Brazil, Singapore and South Korea to Russia. The company employs 19,000 people, manufactures its products at more than 100 locations, and generated sales of $7.2 billion in 2019. A member of the Fortune 500 for the past 66 years, Owens Corning is a storied company in the building materials industry, responsible for numerous innovations.

Although Owens Corning lives in a durable industrial space that addresses fundamental human needs for shelter, today the company is more focused than ever on leaning into the future and seizing new opportunities. Through a renewed emphasis on inclusion and diversity, aggressive 2030 sustainability goals, and a growing digitization of its supply chain, Owens Corning is enhancing its corporate values and honing how it executes.

Vice President of Inclusion and Diversity Leah Maguire said that Owens Corning’s current efforts around inclusion and diversity began a decade ago with the organic formation of community outreach “affinity groups.” Affinity groups brought together communities of women, LGBTQ and Black employees in the Owens Corning family to share experiences, build programs and sponsor unconscious-bias training. 

When the deaths of unarmed Black citizens at the hands of police became a national crisis and caught the business community’s attention, many CEOs signed pledges to make inclusion and diversity a priority, and Brian Chambers, chairman and CEO of Owens Corning, was one of them.

“The first thing we did was hold listening sessions,” Maguire said. Senior leadership partnered with human resources and the Owens Corning affinity groups to create spaces where employees could talk about their experiences.

“Employees came in and trusted us with sharing their lived experiences and brought a lot of candor with respect to what people carry with them into work every day — whether it’s something in their personal lives or what they’re seeing on a community or social level,” Maguire said. “We had employees who shared that they feel somewhat guarded and couldn’t fully bring their authentic selves to work, and we said, ‘We have to do more.’”

Several months later, Maguire’s position was created. She built an inclusion and diversity council of 20 senior leaders from around the company with the purpose of building a culture of appreciation where employees are heard and appreciated for the value that each distinct voice brings to the team. The council is responsible for delivering content, training and experiences to employees to help them connect, and supporting managers in building more inclusive leadership muscles. 

“We have to have high-performing teams, and that means teams that are diverse, capable and fully engaged,” Maguire said.

Owens Corning shares an emerging view of corporate responsibility that seeks to look after not just what’s happening inside the four walls of the business, but in the wider world. Owens Corning’s 2030 sustainability goals include doubling the positive impact of its products and halving the negative impact of its operations.

Owens Corning currently recycles 62% of the physical waste generated by its operations and has further reduced its remaining landfill waste by 18% compared to 2010 levels. The company is focused on reducing the greenhouse gas emission impact of the blowing agents in its foam insulation products and increasing the number of products “made with 100% wind-powered electricity and reduced embodied carbon.”

After partnering with Convoy in 2017 to source outbound truckload capacity from its Santa Clara, California-based insulation plant, Owens Corning has continued to embrace digital innovation in its supply chain.

“The trucking industry is very fluid and we utilize in the neighborhood of 100 dry van carriers to deliver products for our insulation and composites businesses,” said Pat Cassity, supply chain director at Owens Corning. “We had a specific need to gain additional capacity for our Santa Clara plant a few years ago, and Convoy was on our radar screen in terms of being able to provide service.”

Cassity stressed that because its carriers deliver directly to Owens Corning customers, Owens Corning considers them an integral part of its customer experience.

“We believe one of the ways we differentiate ourselves is through our service,” Cassity said.
“Having carriers we can depend on to deliver product undamaged, on time, and as promised, and being able to communicate that information to us and to our customers is of paramount importance.”

Convoy serviced outbound Santa Clara freight and picked up more insulation business, delivering to Owens Corning customers, including insulation distributors. Cassity explained that delivery windows to distributors are often very tight, because the customer will have an installation crew waiting to unload the truck, load their own truck and take it to the job site for installation. In that sense, Owens Corning’s logistics operation for its insulation products is far more “just in time” than many people realize.

“They’ve been able to deliver superior service,” Cassity said. “Convoy did well in that business segment, which gave us the confidence to have them deliver our composites products to OEMs.”

Owens Corning started working with Convoy on outbound freight from one insulation manufacturing plant to its distributors but now has woven the digital freight network into the operations of its composites business. Owens Corning is a leading manufacturer of fiberglass composites like those used in cars, RVs, ceiling tiles and wind blades: Its composites business had 2019 revenues of $2 billion.

Cassity highlighted two further areas where Convoy has stood out. First, Convoy Go’s drop trailer pool has allowed Owens Corning to use labor more efficiently and smooth its facility operations.

“As we talked to Convoy a year and half ago about growing in our network, we told them up front that one of the barriers was around being able to provide us trailers,” Cassity said. “They put together a power-only program where they bring in extra trailers. Drivers do not have to wait to be loaded, as we can pre-load the extra trailers in advance. That program was unique to Convoy as a broker.”

The second point of differentiation, Cassity said, was Convoy’s ability to integrate with Owens Corning’s visibility solution provider of choice so that Owens Corning and its customers could track the location of all shipments.

“Convoy’s ability to adapt to Owens Corning’s needs, and the needs of our customers, has led to them now supporting several origins for our Insulation and Composites businesses,” Cassity said.

The post Leaning in at Owens Corning appeared first on Convoy.

This case study was originally published on FreightWaves.
If you like this story, you’ll love our other Shipper Testimonials.

More than ever, the world’s largest and most sophisticated shippers are using logistics technology to drive efficiencies in their supply chains and meet corporate sustainability goals.

Consumers, employees and board members have become more aware of climate change and the carbon footprint of goods consumption. In response, many companies have issued ambitious sustainability targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, physical waste and water usage. 

In 2018, Anheuser-Busch (A-B) announced its sustainability goals for 2025, which include using 100% recycled or returnable packaging materials, investing in renewable electricity, implementing sustainable farming practices, reducing water usage in breweries, and investing in local watersheds. The goals also call for a 25% reduction in carbon emissions across the company’s entire value chain. As part of that initiative, A-B has come to focus on Scope 3 emissions, which include indirect emissions in the supply chain from suppliers and transportation partners. 

Anheuser-Busch’s transportation needs are vast: The company operates more than 100 facilities in North America, from agricultural production sites to breweries, packaging plants and distribution centers. A-B moves roughly 800,000 shipments per year across 12,000 unique lanes. The beverage giant uses a large private fleet and is working toward a 50-50 balance between its own assets, which focus on dense, short-haul portions of the network, and purchased transportation for over-the-road legs.

Asset-based carriers, traditional brokerages, managed transportation solutions and intermodal providers all play a role in moving Anheuser-Busch’s beer and other beverage products to its customers. I spoke to Angie Slaughter, vice president of sustainability, logistics, SVC and capabilities procurement. Slaughter, an environmental and chemical engineer by training, has spent her entire career at A-B, where she started in 1997 as an engineering manager in brewing and utilities.

“Transportation is key to our long-term 2025 sustainability goal of reducing carbon emissions throughout our entire value chain by 25%,” Slaughter explained. “Transportation is 9% of that. In addition to our consideration of alternative fuels — we’re working with Nikola and Tesla to make our entire dedicated fleet zero emission — we are also looking first at optimization, reducing emissions through picking the right mode of transport in the first place, and ensuring that all backhauls are full.”

Filling Anheuser-Busch’s backhauls poses a challenge and a massive opportunity for efficiency gains and reduced environmental impact. Every year, Slaughter said, A-B has 20 million empty miles in its dedicated fleet that need to be filled with freight. 

In 2016, A-B began working with Convoy, the Seattle-based digital freight network, on its supply chain. 

“As our relationship with Convoy has grown, we’ve learned a lot from them in terms of what they can do with data transparency and visibility,” Slaughter said. “We deepened that partnership over time and now they assist us not just with shorter, complex lanes but also denser, more consistent OTR lanes.”

The data that Convoy generates for Anheuser-Busch goes well beyond visibility, which Slaughter said was a minimum expectation for all of its carriers. Convoy’s real-time insights into transportation market cost and capacity availability help A-B buy smarter, Slaughter said. 

A-B already has a strong data culture where key performance indicators are constantly measured and ranked so that opportunities for improvement can be targeted, Slaughter said. In particular, Anheuser-Busch benchmarks all of its facilities, stacking them from worst to best, looking for outliers, and calculating how much could be gained if laggards were brought up to average performance and benchmarks. Convoy furnishes A-B with monthly facility reports based on carrier reviews, enabling A-B to identify hot spots within its network, understand the cost of operating inefficiently and rapidly implement changes.

“When you collaborate with your freight partners and combine your data, you build trust and stronger relationships,” Slaughter said. “You’re able to look more strategically at the total cost of shipping and the real value you get from your partnerships.”

Convoy’s Automated Reloads program has started to make progress in solving A-B’s 20 million empty miles challenge. With Automated Reloads, Convoy “batches” round-trip routes, booking headhaul and backhaul loads at the same time to keep trucks rolling and asset utilization high.

“On the digital freight matching side, batching loads and getting those full-turn shipments contracted is where we’re going to see the biggest gains in the future,” Slaughter said. 

Asset utilization in Anheuser-Busch’s private fleet became even more challenging when the coronavirus pandemic affected part of A-B’s business. Restaurants, bars, hotels and live sporting events, which represented a significant portion of A-B’s sales, were restricted. Anheuser-Busch still had to move a substantial amount of volume, Slaughter said, but had to do so in a different way.

With little insight into how the crisis would evolve and how consumer behavior would change, Anheuser-Busch needed transportation partners that could offer agility and creativity as events unfolded. A-B’s planned distribution was disrupted as products that would have been allocated to restaurants and bars were shipped instead to grocery stores and supermarkets, requiring adjustments in purchased transportation well before the typical summer surge.

“COVID-19 tested the agility in our supply chain,” Slaughter said. “It’s been disruptive to a lot of people, and we have to be there for our consumers and ensure our customers are able to go to the grocery store and find their favorite beer at the right time. Where Convoy helps is being that partner that is still delivering, still meeting expectations and still coming to us with ideas for improvement. We expect them to challenge us and bring us new ideas and new thoughts about how we can improve.”

The good news, Slaughter said, is that consumer behaviors are starting to normalize as the economy reopens. But one pandemic trend that won’t reverse itself is the technology adoption forced on supply chain managers and the transportation industry.

“The whole industry was forced very quickly to take on more technology adoption that won’t reverse now,” Slaughter said. “This crisis accelerated the digitization of freight and made it come faster.” API integrations with strategic partners that provided real-time pricing as A-B raced to shift freight across its lanes were a critical element in managing the impact of the crisis.  

At Anheuser-Busch, the work never stops in building the most efficient transportation system for the business while also meeting A-B’s ambitious sustainability goals.

“We want world-class operational excellence continuously driving efficiencies across our operation and our value chain — everything we touch in logistics — and that translates into cost savings, reduced emissions, improved driver experiences, all the way down the line,” Slaughter said. “Ultimately what we want is our happy customers finding their favorite beers exactly where they’re supposed to be.”

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This case study was originally published on FreightWaves.
If you like this story, you’ll love our other Shipper Testimonials.

CHEP’s iconic blue pallet is not just a product offered to customers—it’s also a unique source of data that helps eliminate waste across CHEP’s network of partners, which include most of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world.

The Australian pallet, crate, and container pooling company began U.S. operations in 1990 and now has more than 110 million pallets circulating in North America. A pallet that starts its career at a P&G plant today might be headed to a Kroger distribution center and then get recycled back into service at Unilever next month, for instance. 

While the humble wooden pallet carrying so many different kinds of freight may seem like a forgotten part of the transportation and logistics industry, managing the flow of those pallets is an incredibly complex task. CHEP works in more than 500 supply chain points in North America, including its own facilities as well as operations set up in customer locations, and supplies pallets to approximately 14,000 manufacturing locations in the United States.

Those pallets are taken in by customers, loaded with freight, shipped to distribution centers and warehouses, deconsolidated, reconsolidated, and then sent further downstream to more than 19,000 retail locations. CHEP collects pallets from those locations and refurbishes them to be used again. 

CHEP’s customer data ultimately generates profound insights into North American freight flows, and CHEP has made it part of the company’s mission to help its customers meet their sustainability goals by eliminating physical waste, reducing empty miles, and driving out other inefficiencies in the supply chain. 

“Our business model is inherently circular,” said Jonathan North, who heads CHEP’s Zero Waste World program in North America, a collaboration platform that helps CHEP’s customers solve their biggest environmental challenges. In other words, CHEP’s business model is based on recycling its pallets and eliminating physical waste; now the company uses what it has learned about efficiency to help its customers reduce emissions and meet other goals.

North said that CHEP counts 43 of the top 50 consumer packaged goods shippers among its customers, and that they are all becoming increasingly committed to sustainability as a corporate value.

“How do we take this inherently circular and sustainable business that we have, and add to that our tremendous network visibility, and leverage that and help our customers with their goals?” North asked.

CHEP uses its visibility into its customers’ networks to identify lanes of opportunity, where the shipper’s private fleet has an empty backhaul. First, CHEP sees if any of its pallets need to be moved in the same lane and can fill the truck, but it also looks across its customer base to see if it can optimize matching loads to trucks.

“If there’s not a CHEP pallet flow available, then we look at another customer to share assets and resources on the road,” North explained. “The whole goal is to reduce empty miles, and to better utilize the equipment, a key circular economy attribute.”

That includes empty miles in CHEP’s own network, which consists of three basic types of movements. First, CHEP’s supply chain points move pallets into customers’ manufacturing sites. CHEP’s locations are close to their customers’ facilities so that pallet orders can be filled responsively. Secondly, CHEP takes in used pallets from downstream locations to assess and recycle them.

But it’s the third type of movement in CHEP’s network where most of its empty miles lie: the relocation of pallets from surplus markets to deficit markets. Freight flows in the United States tend to be unbalanced because production and consumption are unevenly distributed. For example, many products—from food to automotive parts—are manufactured in the Midwest, but the American population is concentrated on the coasts. This imbalance requires CHEP to relocate a certain proportion of pallets, resulting in longer lengths of haul between their own supply chain points.

That’s where Convoy, the Seattle-based digital freight network, comes in. Convoy, a Zero Waste World collaborative partner, helps CHEP balance its longer pallet relocation moves and eliminate empty miles while giving CHEP feedback from drivers on the efficiency of its locations. While CHEP’s shorter moves are typically handled by dedicated carriers, it uses contracted carriers for its linehaul moves, and Convoy is able to source reliable capacity in those lanes.

“What’s interesting about Convoy is that they’re really tapping into where the capacity is in the market,” said George Brehovsky, director of customer solutions at CHEP North America. “The average size of an owner-operator fleet is anywhere from three to five drivers, and quite often we wouldn’t partner with a carrier that size. With Convoy, it’s a collective, and we’re able to tap into that capacity.

Convoy’s Automated Reloads program establishes optimized loops for carriers to run in, efficiently utilizing carrier assets and lowering CHEP’s transportation costs. In a study, Convoy found that Automated Reloads has cut carrier CO2 emissions by 45% by reducing empty miles. Meanwhile, Convoy has used its drop trailer program—Convoy Go—to increase fluidity and build a virtual dedicated fleet servicing CHEP’s freight.

“One of the unique things about Convoy is we get specific feedback around our service centers and supply chain points,” added Brehovsky. “When we kicked off the partnership, we found there were some locations where drivers were experiencing longer than what we would consider acceptable waiting times. We were able to take that feedback from those drivers and look at those supply chain points within our network and actually reduce driver waiting time.”

The post How CHEP’s unique pallet data drives sustainability for its partners appeared first on Convoy.

In the age of fast, free e-commerce shipping and painless returns, more companies—even small businesses—view their supply chains as part of their customer service experience, and treat them as sources of additive value rather than cost.

The company had already made the transition from recovering, sterilizing, and recycling bottles to importing new glass and creating custom packaging for its customers, expanding its service offerings. But the sales and customer service teams selling bottles to winemakers were responsible for finding their own transportation solutions, including booking trucks. 

It took Encore’s customer service too long to cover their orders. They often purchased transportation at a significant premium to market prices.

Encore’s transportation operation—it had no dedicated team—stood in stark contrast to its commitment to customer service. Encore required no minimum order, promising to fulfill the smallest customers’ needs with exactly the right bottles, delivered just in time to be filled. 

Getting the right product on time to small winemakers, who often don’t have sufficient storage space and are tucked away in remote corners of the Santa Cruz Mountains, requires experienced carriers who know what they’re doing. Encore found those carriers, but it didn’t have a way to efficiently manage its relationships with them.

Near the end of 2016, Encore asked Phil Russell, one of its customer service representatives who had recently moved to operations, to take on the job of managing the company’s transportation on a full-time basis.

“One of the big things in being asked to run a transport department was to be more diligent in how we booked a truck or spent money on freight,” said Russell, now the transportation supervisor at Encore. “After a year into it, I needed help wrapping my arms around the entire picture, so I recruited another logistics rep to help manage, and now we’ve added a third.”

Deliberately managing a transportation department requires a certain amount of clarity about what the company is trying to accomplish through its supply chain.

“I don’t want the cheapest freight; I want the best overall service and value,” Russell said. “Value is service first and then dollar paid. It’s about keeping our customers happy and maintaining continuity.”

Russell also emphasized Encore’s strategy of demonstrating commitment to the smallest winemakers and helping them grow their businesses through reliable service and top-notch glass and packaging.

“If our customers don’t grow, we don’t grow,” Russell said. “Smaller winemakers have friends— if I’m bottling in my garage, I might know people at a larger operation. It’s a tight-knit industry, and both positive and negative experiences travel far.”

In 2019, Encore shipped to customers in 241 cities from its facilities in Fairfield, California and on the East Coast. Winemaking and bottling are linked to the agricultural rhythm of grape harvesting, which drove seasonal volatility in Encore’s transportation needs. November through March is typically the slower season before a huge rush in the summer, Russell said, noting that smaller winemakers are typically quite seasonal. Recently Encore added some large “custom crush” facilities that bottle wine year-round to its roster of customers, smoothing out some demand volatility.

Russell said that partnering with Convoy, the Seattle-based digital freight network, back in 2017 was a major step forward in making Encore’s transportation operations more efficient and freeing up his team to focus on customer relationships.

Convoy built a desktop solution for Encore that allows Russell to offer loads to the 20–25 trucking carriers he prefers working with, he said. 

“Wineries are in beautiful places in the country, and they’re hard places for trucks to get to, sometimes in the middle of the mountains,” Russell said. “Not every truck driver can drive a 53-foot trailer into these locations. Our carrier base has to be very skilled at navigating small roads and making small deliveries.”

With Convoy, Russell’s team cut their average time to book a load from an hour to about 10 minutes, he said. Encore’s transportation department had been consumed by putting out fires on a daily basis without the ability to get ahead of the work or make data-driven adjustments, but greater efficiencies have freed up resources and time.

“By getting out of the emails and having to babysit every load, now we’re looking two weeks in advance—we’re that far ahead—and looking at orders that are going to be a challenge,” Russell said. “Convoy allows us to be smarter about what we’re doing.”

A more efficient supply chain operation allows Encore to prioritize what matters: carrier and customer relationships. 

“The carrier is an extension of Encore,” Russell said. “I want each carrier to know that not only do I care about on-time delivery and pickup, I care about your family, and we can talk about stuff outside of work—we have a relationship.”

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This case study was originally published on FreightWaves.
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Waiākea Hawaiian Volcanic Water was created in 2012 not only to be an ethically sourced premium water brand, but according to its founder, to change the consumer packaged goods industry from the inside out.

The water itself comes from a spring at the foot of the Mauna Loa volcano, which is fed by snowmelt and rainwater that naturally flows through thousands of feet of porous volcanic rock before emerging near the town of Hilo. Waiākea collects a tiny fraction of the water and bottles it in a nearby plant staffed by local workers. The bottles are made from 100% recycled polyethylene terephtalate (RPET), a sustainable material that Waiākea introduced to the premium water industry, with much of it sourced from plastic recovered from the oceans. 

The company cites mālama i ka ‘āina, which means ‘to respect and care for the land,’ as an important pillar of Hawaiian culture and one of Waiākea’s core values. 

Waiākea supports a number of sustainability initiatives, from reforestation in Hawaii to fleet electrification across the U.S. In fact, Waiākea was the first bottled water to be certified CarbonNeutral. But the company’s supply chain strategy has evolved over the years. Waiākea has leveraged its growing volumes to drive more efficiency in its network, reducing costs, transit times and carbon emissions, all while fulfilling just-in-time orders to local distributors who carry very little inventory.

When Alexandra Alegria joined Waiākea as director of supply chain and logistics three years ago, she already had a lot on her plate. Waiākea was doubling its revenue every year, which meant bringing multiple new distributors online each year – in 2019, Waiākea added 10 distributors. The growth also meant that a network of warehouses had to be designed and built to serve the entire country. Finally, Waiākea wanted to convert its purchased transportation from less-than-truckload (LTL) to full truckload to save money and source capacity faster. And it wanted to do all of those things while maintaining its CarbonNeutral certification for both its product and business.

“We have a constantly evolving supply chain,” Alegria said. “When I started three years ago, sustainable supply chain wasn’t a widely known concept. We had three warehouses, two in California and one in New Jersey, but we were shipping across the United States.”

Now Waiākea has nine warehouses on the mainland, which helps keep its transit times under two days. A partnership with a parcel integrator’s carbon neutral program handles Waiākea’s direct-to-consumer shipments. LTL lanes were optimized to put multiple shipments on the same truck, and some over-the-road truckload shipments from the West Coast to the East Coast are now intermodal.

Converting Waiākea’s linehaul network – which moves water from Waiākea warehouses to local distributors – from LTL to full truckload was tricky, Alegria said.

“When I started, we only had a partnership with an LTL brokerage,” Alegria recalled. “We were sourcing full truckloads through them, which drove up the rates exponentially. Water is a very heavy product and can be very expensive to ship.”

At that time, just 30% of Waiākea’s linehaul transportation was full truckload; the remaining 70% was LTL. The LTL carriers were inherently less flexible because Waiākea’s freight had to fit into their trucks’ specific schedules; it took longer to book a truck, and LTL rates penalized water for its weight.

Waiākea wanted its warehouses to be within a two-day transit of each other, and they needed to be able to ship quickly to local distributors that were stocking shelves at retail locations, typically within five miles of their own locations. 

“Any supply chain director gets 10 to 20 cold calls per day from different logistics companies,” Alegria said. “You’re constantly bombarded with the same promises over and over again. But two years ago, Convoy was the first to reach out to us with a digital platform, and it offered transparency I didn’t have with other logistics companies. Convoy was looking at it from a much more analytic perspective; being so data-driven drew me to them.”

Convoy’s commitment to sustainability and the reduction of empty miles and carbon emissions in its carrier network also helped Waiākea pull the trigger. Programs like Automated Reloads in particular automatically fills backhauls for carriers and keeps their trucks running in efficient loops, maximizing capacity utilization and cutting empty miles by 45%.

Alegria watched as Convoy built density in more lanes over time. Waiākea gradually gave Convoy more and more freight as its business grew and it converted LTL shipments to full truckload. Waiākea started by giving Convoy 10 loads per month; now it’s 95 to 100 loads per month, said Alegria, representing about 80% of Waiākea’s wholesale business.

Waiākea still has a goal of moving to 100% full truckload transportation in its linehaul network. Converting the remaining LTL freight to full truckload requires a complex orchestration of Waiākea’s supply chain, including its production plants in Hilo and its warehouse network, with its customers’ behavior.

“We try to partner with our customers to let them know if they order in the full truckload range they can get their loads a lot faster,” Alegria said. “Sometimes they’ll place five smaller purchase orders, and we have to wait until we get the fifth one to make a full truck. Convoy is helping us understand how to combine those loads and giving us automated triggers so we can go to our customers with the data and say ‘if you give us these orders in this time frame, we can do xyz.’”

Like most beverage companies, Waiākea’s business experiences seasonal volatility, with a pronounced demand surge in the summer months. Alegria said that Waiākea tries to ease into the push by using promotions to get stores stocked in the spring. Convoy also helps Waiākea understand when and where trucking capacity is tightening as the summer progresses.

“Convoy lets us know that if we have to ship something to Florida and it’s juice season, maybe we should ship from Texas instead of Pennsylvania,” Alegria said. “They give us that kind of advice because they know our supply chain and know where our warehouses are. We’re constantly having conversations about how to optimize things depending on the season and what the business looks like.”

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