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DSV Solutions faces the challenge of managing complex transport operations for a diverse range of clients across various sectors. The company needs to ensure cost savings, value addition, and optimal transparency for its customers. The logistics service provider handles high-value equipment in the hi-tech industry, hospital deliveries in the healthcare sector, and spare parts supply in the automotive sector, among other tasks. Managing these diverse requirements and ensuring accurate invoicing and performance tracking is a significant challenge.

Kramp faced several challenges in their supply chain operations. Firstly, they had regionalized supply chains with separate distribution centers for each region, leading to stock availability issues and difficulties in dynamically organizing and fulfilling orders across multiple centers. Secondly, they had limited inbound and outbound visibility, with manual execution of transportation leading to inefficiencies and fragmented visibility from carriers, resulting in increased customer inquiries and support costs. Lastly, with significant organizational growth through acquisitions, Kramp needed a platform that could grow with them, connect fragmented IT infrastructure, and adapt to their changing business needs.

A multinational oil and gas company relied on thousands of suppliers worldwide, including remote partners in Azerbaijan, Alaska, and Angola, for time-critical materials. However, they lacked adequate visibility and transportation management over their 60K purchase orders a year. This resulted in incomplete deliveries, a lack of insight into shipment status, and high administrative and process costs. The company faced significant challenges in managing their supply chain efficiently, leading to operational inefficiencies and increased costs.

Wehkamp faced several challenges in its eCommerce operations. Firstly, the expanding fulfillment requirements due to multiple brands and a wide variety of products, including appliances, small electronics, furniture, and clothing, required a flexible fulfillment process. Small items needed high volume pick/pack/ship processes, while larger items like furniture required consolidation, inspection, and advanced pallet builds. Additionally, the 'endless aisle' of products made suppliers' direct shipping critical for on-time delivery. Secondly, Wehkamp had limited visibility with its suppliers, leading to missed opportunities to reduce inventory across the network and limited ability to take action on customer orders in danger of missing delivery windows. Lastly, customers demanded faster delivery, including same-day delivery and white-glove services, which required Wehkamp to cut lead times across the supply chain, not just in transportation.

Design-To-Deliver (DTD) faced the challenge of optimizing its supply chain to offer better service levels, faster delivery, more choice, and less inventory while keeping costs down. The complexity of managing orders, distribution, inventory, transport, returns, purchasing, and repairs across multiple regional and central distribution centers made it difficult to visualize and calculate costs quickly. DTD needed a solution to handle these complexities and improve its service to customers like ICP, a leading international computer firm that required timely and accurate delivery of spare parts for maintenance purposes.

The logistics service provider needed a smart and flexible platform for a new global client: an industrial manufacturer for the marine and energy sectors with complex aftermarket services. The client had limited visibility into service levels and costs across a global network of warehouses and carriers, and shipments were often remote, under strict time windows and required expediting.

Due to the timely nature of getting books on display at stores for their expected release dates, Readerlink’s customers, distribution centers, and internal stakeholders need timely answers to detailed questions. In order to provide information with the necessary speed and accuracy, they required Advanced Visibility to power business intelligence extending all the way down to individual line-items. This task required 200 manhours a week, causing their team to take time away from handling more customer-centric initiatives.

Fulfilling exact street date and OTIF requirements for thousands of retailers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico strained Technicolor’s tracking capabilities. As technology evolved, they found ways to track shipments through cell phones; however, these methods didn’t provide Technicolor with the instant and accurate tracking data they needed. The company needed to find new technologies that offered real-time tracking right down to the box and SKU.

Magna’s Smart Factory required just-in-sequence deliveries from a range of locations. To ensure deliveries arrived in sequence regardless of origin, Magna Steyr needed a smarter way to access over-the-road visibility in the European market.

Prior to adopting project44’s Advanced Visibility Platform, Gebrüder Weiss faced a growing risk of thefts when handling the transport of high-value goods. This issue was compounded by increasing customer demands for an operational overview of the transport process. The company needed a solution that could provide real-time tracking and monitoring to ensure the security of these valuable shipments. The challenge was to find a system that could alert them to any deviations from secure routes or unscheduled stops, thereby allowing them to take immediate action to mitigate risks.

To reduce the amount of paid idle time, Cargoways needed a TMS integration to access the location and availability of carriers’ trucks.

Univar aimed to become the most valued chemical and ingredient distributor globally by enhancing the delivery experience, reducing transportation costs, and making data-driven decisions. However, their existing technology stack lacked an Advanced Visibility Platform, which was crucial for providing high-quality, real-time data to optimize the delivery experience.

Prior to implementing Advanced Visibility, Uline had little insight into the movement of their shipments and carriers. To strengthen their competitive advantage, they were looking for ways to leverage higher-quality and more real-time transportation data to decrease costs, increase internal productivity, and improve customer loyalty.

The manufacturer was experiencing an increased demand from customers for real-time information about shipments, predictable delivery commitments, self-service capabilities, and flexibility into order quantities and capabilities. While these customer expectations are becoming increasingly common, shippers face challenges when attempting to keep up with innovative competition. This manufacturer was leveraging disparate systems with siloed data, complex multimodal transportation, inventory constraints, and limited flexibility from suppliers.

The largest ecommerce retailer struggled to gain accurate insight into the critical pull time (CPT) at fulfillment centers and critical entry time (CET) at sort centers. Without the ability to pinpoint the cause of issues, whether it was a delayed carrier or inefficiencies at the fulfillment or sort center, the retailer could not take action or proactively manage downstream delays. They were reliant on manual and incomplete logs as well as self-reported carrier data. With these delays impacting Delivery Estimate Accuracy (DEA), they needed advanced visibility into their middle mile lanes.

With fragmented organizational insight into transportation documentation, the 3PL found themselves spending a significant amount of time and money handling tedious administrative tasks. On top of the resources wasted on this manual process, it resulted in delayed payments, invoicing inaccuracies, and an extended cash conversion cycle. They realized they needed to move away from this time-consuming and labor-intensive approach.

Customers’ tracking expectations evolved from wanting an estimated delivery date to needing visibility at every stage of the shipment. Without a modern digital platform, the manufacturer was dependent on EDI data, leaving them without access to accurate, timely data and limiting their ability to meet customer needs and make effective, proactive decisions.

The traditional 3PL model relies heavily on manpower for visibility functions, which is both untimely and error-prone. Legacy technologies and manual processes, such as emailing with brokers or making check calls, slow down the flow of information, costing shippers time and money. Opus9 aimed to build a digital 3PL from the ground up, leveraging technology to automate key shipping processes. This required them to be on the cutting edge of technology to overcome the inefficiencies and high costs associated with traditional methods.

M&S Food has a complex supply chain, having direct contracts with around 400 suppliers producing products at over 800 sites in 44 countries. Raw materials and commodities are sourced from more than 70 countries, and M&S estimate around 30,000 farms are used globally. M&S have always placed their main emphasis on the quality of its food products, with industry experts constantly working to bring their customers the best products. The M&S buying teams work with their suppliers to source unusual and new ingredients, to bring something new and different to their customers. However, as their network continues to expand, in both home and international markets, customers are more concerned with where and how their products are being sourced, made, and delivered. This global nature of their business means M&S and their supply chain face a number of sustainability challenges. Their customers and employees are increasingly interested in all aspects of their products’ integrity, and expect M&S to engage with their suppliers to ensure fair working conditions and respect for human rights throughout the value chain.

With Value Vinyls' interconnected supply chain, one of the significant challenges was excessive email traffic and limited booking visibility due to limited platform services. In helping Value Vinyls overcome its unique challenges, we focused on reducing the number of processes and streamlining the essential ones, allowing their employees to do what they do best: running their business. Kevin Boeck, Logistics Manager, shares further insight: “Our process before using Shippabo was very manual: emailed communication every two weeks for pricing and physical data storage lookup. All of this cost my department valuable time. Streamlining our responses has been a huge success. This helps keep me sane! Shippabo’s platform has reduced the number of hours to send emails from four to two hours a day. I also love the communication features and the flexibility of being able to use email or the platform.” All these operational challenges were compounded by relying on conventional freight forwarders who could not communicate efficiently and clearly. To gain control of its supply chain, Value Vinyls needed: • A stable shipping contract that ensured guaranteed capacity • A single platform that unified their global shipping activity and communications • A freight forwarding company that was an extension of their team and prioritized their customer service

With numerous retailers over the globe, NJ Croce Company was facing the balancing act of meeting their customers’ needs promptly while scouring through endless email trails. The main challenge was keeping track of all shipments in one place, with organized communication, documents, timelines, etc. Shippabo allows NJ Croce Company to organize data as needed. The company needed to reduce the number of processes and streamline essential ones, allowing employees to focus on running their family business and upholding a legacy of toy-making going back to 1953.

Optoma Technology faced significant challenges during the pandemic, including skyrocketing freight rates and a lack of a centralized platform for managing shipments. The company relied on overseas agents for bookings, which led to confusion and delays due to manual processes. They needed a freight forwarding partner that could offer competitive pricing and a way to easily track and share shipment information in one central location. Additionally, they required automation for various manual tasks to focus on growing their business.

JR286's supply chain spans the globe and often their manufacturing partners directly ship to wholesale clients, brand headquarters, and independent distributors. Managing such a complex web of interlocking partners and shipments became overwhelmingly difficult. In addition, this problem prevented the JR286 sales team from proactively selling before inventory could be logged into a local warehouse. With more than 800 twenty-foot equivalent units expected to ship in 2019, JR286’s top priority was to create greater cross-functional and cross-division visibility into their supply. All these operational challenges were compounded by a reliance on conventional freight forwarders who could not guarantee critical shipping times and the required space. To gain control of its supply chain, JR286 needed a stable shipping contract that ensured guaranteed capacity, accurate visibility into SKU-level data inventory flows, a single platform that unified their global shipping activity, and a global source of real-time data to enable cross-functional collaboration.

Imerys S.A. faced significant challenges with their manual, spreadsheet-based container tracking system. This method caused frequent errors in shipment management, leading to operational downtime. Each country required a dedicated resource to validate and update tracking data daily, which was time-consuming and inefficient. The lack of real-time shipment visibility resulted in high detention and demurrage fees, further impacting their operations. Additionally, data silos hindered customer service and made it difficult to benchmark shipping lines' KPIs effectively.

Rapid growth in demand for its grocery delivery presented the customer with scalability challenges. Other operational problems like manual processes, poor visibility, and difficulties in ensuring customer centricity were weighing down their delivery operations. The need to address end-user privacy, growing first-attempt delivery failures, poor customer experience, and delivery visibility, inability to scale operations based on market demands, inability to customize deliveries based on business needs, inefficient slot-based delivery management, and manual delivery allocation of drivers and routes were some of the critical challenges they had to address to sustain growth.

To optimize and enhance the management of massive shipment volumes, our customer had to reduce freight costs, increase supply chain transparency, and automate freight procurement operations. Here’s a list of the critical challenges.\n\nManual freight procurement negotiations\nLack of transparency over market rates and cost deviations\nIncreasing freight spend and cost leakages\nManual processes leading to long turnaround times

To optimize and enhance the management of massive shipment volumes, our customer had to increase supply chain transparency, reduce freight costs and automate freight procurement operations. Here’s a list of the critical challenges.\n\n• Manual negotiations in freight procurement \n• Increasing freight spend and cost leakages \n• Lack of visibility in shipment execution \n• Manual processes leading to high turnaround times \n• Siloed communication between teams \n• Lack of transparency over market rates and cost deviation \n• Data inconsistency and inaccuracies \n• Multiple tools of communication caused operational complexity

Jain Irrigation Systems faced significant challenges in providing their customers with real-time container status and estimated times of arrival (ETAs). This lack of visibility led to inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction. Additionally, their manual accounting processes were prone to errors, resulting in productivity losses and increased operational costs. The company also struggled with email-based collaboration, which caused communication delays and further hampered their logistics operations.

In order to test their payment processing application, the QA team at this financial services company determined their data feeds must be simulated in a highly controlled fashion. To reproduce complex transaction data feeds, the team copied a subset of their production data and prepared it for testing. Production data is attractive because it contains real transactions in the proper data interchange format. However, to prepare the data for testing, it had to be laboriously reworked by hand to create the data variations and permutations needed for test cases while removing all sensitive customer and merchant information. It took the QA staff 160 man-hours (an entire man month) to build a test data set. Because the data interchange format was revised every six months, the number of man-hours required for test data provisioning effectively doubles over the course of a year. The tedious nature of the provisioning process placed limits on the variety of test data available for functional, integration and regression testing. And the limits on the volume of data provisioned was impacting their ability to perform the load and performance testing required to simulate heavy transaction loads. In the end, they concluded there were too many problems associated with using production data alone for testing purposes. The following summarizes their rationale. Production data is not controlled data Without manual modification, test data copied from production data can only test for conditions represented by a given data subset. It does not provide the QA team with the necessary data to test edge case conditions, the presence of invalid data values, or specific input value combinations that might uncover software defects. To maximize code coverage under all potential operating conditions, test data must be controlled to simulate data feeds that contain all of the data variations required by each test case and its assertions. Production data is not secure data Business and IT leaders at this financial service company were very concerned about data privacy. The risk of a data breach that might expose sensitive customer credit information was too great when considering the legal and financial consequences. This risk was further compounded by the fact that much of the testing was being performed by offshore contract resources, limiting the internal control over the handling of sensitive customer data. Secure, high volume production test data is not practical Data masking is the conventional approach often used for mitigating the security risks of working with production data. However, masking all of the PII contained in the transaction data feeds used by payment processing systems is a monumental task. Transaction data feeds are complex, nested, fixed file data structures that contain control codes, record types, accumulated transaction values, and calculations for reward points and cash-back incentives along with real card holder and merchant account numbers and credit information. Finding and masking the sensitive information in this complex data stream while preserving the referential integrity of the data values is both daunting and time consuming.

QA leadership for this organization wanted to eliminate a potential breach of sensitive customer information, such as social security and credit card account numbers, during their testing process. For this reason, they decided to evaluate the use of synthetic test data. They needed test data in a variety of formats for testing multiple systems and databases, including ASCII, EBCDIC, Parquet, JSON, and AVRO. The database environments include DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL and Snowflake.\n\nPreviously, the QA team pulled data from production and manually scrubbed it to remove sensitive information and to create appropriate data combinations for testing. Now their goal is to automate the process of provisioning secure, synthetic test data with full control over data volume and variation with an ability to output the data in the multiple file formats described above. The QA team was introduced to GenRocket by one of the company’s system integration partners and decided to evaluate GenRocket’s Test Data Automation capabilities as part of a formal Proof of Concept (POC).