Overcoming the Challenges of Decentralized Systems
PLD’s transportation team was working in a decentralized manner, with carrier routing decisions being made by staff at each of its locations who were relying on multiple, nonintegrated systems to manage their work. The company’s existing system provided carrier rating support with limited load and mode planning for less-thantruckload (LTL) and truckload shipments, but lacked small parcel rating and shipping capabilities. Additionally, the system did not provide carrier times-in-transit to support accurate delivery planning. Freight audit and invoicing was handled on two disparate systems, which resulted in extra steps to merge invoicing data for analysis. Patrick Heelan, PLD’s VP of Logistics, knew that the company could improve decision-making and efficiency by adopting a centralized, real-time transportation management (TMS) solution that could provide rates and transit times for all modes.
“Ship dates get pushed completely upstream through the entire process, all the way through to when that product needs to be manufactured so that we can ship it on time to our customer.” In the case of shipping incomplete orders, his team also needed the ability to re-rate and replan the shipment for lowest cost on-time delivery. “We needed one system to process all shipments, all modes, with all of our data on orders in one place,” he said. “Data visibility is critical to everything we do between pricing our products, where we’re storing them – everything. We’re constantly looking at data.”
Benefits • PLD achieved $1.5 million in transportation savings after implementing the e2open Global Parcel and Audit solution. • Enhanced transportation planning. PLD has centralized on a single platform for all modes, managing more than 30 carriers with real-time data visibility for enhanced decision making. • Improved data analytics. All order and shipping data is uploaded to a central dashboard. • Improved labor utilization. Planning is now managed by 2 staff instead of 5 staff, allowing PLD to allocate resources to other lead roles and curtailing the need to add staff to fill those roles. • Reduced back-office support. With e2open Freight Payment and Audit solution in place, the accounts payable department no longer needs to process 50,000 carrier invoices a year.
Source
