Six entries described by the judges as “innovative”, “collaborative” and delivering “impressive results” in equal measure comprise the shortlist for the Supply Chain Visibility Award at the 2020 Supply Chain Excellence Awards.
The Supply Chain Visibility Award recognises projects that can demonstrate excellence in supply chain visibility right through the supply chain. Examples could include projects that have improved order processing, inventory, delivery and mitigated potential supply chain disruptions.
You can discover who wins the award by registering watch one of two broadcasts of the virtual Supply Chain Excellence Awards 2020 on the 12th November:
Register here for the 3.30pm broadcast.
Or register here for the 7.00pm broadcast.
Controlant
Controlant is digitally connecting the global cold chain, providing unparalleled insights for pharmaceutical manufacturers and logistics providers into the location and quality conditions of products as they travel throughout the supply chain, in addition to broader analytics into their supply chain operations.
Controlant’s Cold Chain as a Service solution provides a single source of supply chain truth. The solution consists of Internet of Things data loggers that collect and send mission-critical supply chain insights in real-time to Controlant’s cloud-enabled software platform, and cost-reducing operational services. Controlant customers leverage the improved visibility to connect stakeholders, improve efficiency, and increase revenues.
Decathlon with Geek+
Technology from Geek+ delivered impressive results for Decathlon, including a tripling of the average productivity of warehouse teammates, as well as increasing inventory capacity by 40%. The ‘goods-to-person’ solution, using P800 robots from Geek+, introduced a flexibility that was simply not available to Decathlon from other, more traditional, automation set-ups.
According to Bruno Thellier, Transformation Leader at Decathlon: “It’s not so much that Geek+ solved a specific existing problem, but more that they gave us totally new capabilities, offering us efficiencies and improvements that were simply not on the table before we worked with them.”
Gist with Starbucks
Gist has its customers at the heart of everything we do. As individuals and as a collective organisation we strive on a daily basis to deliver excellence. Starbucks and Gist have a long-standing, highly-integrated, collaborative relationship. The partnership formed in 2011 and has gone from strength to strength with a number of strategic developments, including the introduction of a dedicated Customer Excellence Team in June 2019.
In just three months, Gist formed the team of employees working 364 days a year, and responsible for capturing and resolving delivery queries; processing credit requests; dealing with order entry queries; report service levels; contractual KPIs and analyse trends on claims and service incidents. The team also offers incident support, capturing, logging, communicating, escalating and resolving any question or issue a Starbucks store has regarding orders, deliveries and stock availability. The Customer Excellence Team works closely with Starbucks and the value added insight the team provides has been instrumental to the success of the relationship.
The judges said this entry was a well executed programme to improve supply chain visibility driving both financial and non-financial benefits and capability.
Kolonial.no and RELEX Solutions
Kolonial.no is Norway’s largest online grocery retailer and the fastest growing company in the sector in the Nordic region. Kolonial.no offers a range of more than 6,700 products delivered to their clients’ homes or to pick up points. Kolonial.no has worked with RELEX to improve availability while simultaneously cutting costs and waste through better forecasting and replenishment. Increasing supply chain visibility was a key factor in reaching their goals. RELEX was founded in 2005 by three postgraduate supply chain & logistics researchers and has expanded to offer its unified retail planning technology to companies all around the world. Their goal is to perfect retail operations through more accurate and efficient use of data.
Today, the retail optimisation software helps companies hone a competitive edge in the age of Living Retail, where change is the only constant. Since implementing RELEX, Kolonial.no has seen huge improvements in supply chain visibility across the entire chain. Kolonial.no has not only been able to increase sales significantly, but at the same time cut the spoiled products proportion of sales down by 44%. Availability levels have been maintained meaning their dramatic growth and waste reduction has not increased stock-outs. Inventory turnover is also up by 25%.
Knauf UK with Sixfold & Transporeon
With its real-time visibility (RTV) solution, Sixfold creates transparency, improves efficiency, reduces costs, and delivers a consumer-like level of insight about each shipment. Through pattern recognition and the interpretation of internal and external data, it accurately calculates each truck’s arrival time. This data-driven innovation is used by customers in many industries including Knauf UK, part of the Knauf Group. The company contracts carriers to deliver building products from its two UK plants, prioritising high levels of customer satisfaction with on-time delivery and accurate measurement of carrier performance.
This sustainable Sixfold solution provides new perspectives on end-to-end supply chain automation. The long-term strategic partnership between Sixfold and Transporeon enables predictive transport assignment – in future companies will estimate and book unused carrier capacities with the support of artificial intelligence, eliminating empty runs and unproductive CO 2 emissions.
The judges said that solution helped to unlock overall benefits.
Metro Shipping & LANXESS
LANXESS is an additive chemicals company, headquartered in Cologne, generating sales of over £10 billion, with 15,500 employees operating 59 production sites in 33 countries. LANXESS maintains a fleet of 700 ISO tanks, representing a balance sheet value of £7 million, to collect product from its global manufacturing sites and distribute to customers around the world. Visibility of its ISO tanks location and status is critical for LANXESS to know it has fulfilled a sales contract and the asset is available to reposition.
Metro were retained by LANXESS to deliver pinpoint real-time global visibility and control of this mission-critical £7 million asset. The ultra-secure, cloud-based solution developed by the MVT team manages these critical assets in real-time, with pinpoint accuracy, using a blend of supply chain modelling, GPS tracking and geo-fencing. MVT continuously monitor the ISO fleet progress against the supply chain model, to identify and automatically resolve non-conformities. With MVT, LANXESS has improved profitability by increasing turnaround times and reducing redundant dwell time by up to 50%, which also increases the ROI generated by these key assets. The ISO fleet has grown by 23% without LANXESS adding to the existing global management team.
The judges said this was a great example of collaboration between two partners.
The Supply Chain Excellence Awards 2020 are sponsored by Clipper Logistics; DP World; Geek + and Unipart Logistics.
