16 Dec 2020
The customer is one of the world's largest apparel companies. The company designs and markets jeans, casual wear and related accessories for men, women and children.
 
They sell their products in over 110 countries with a global footprint of more than 3,000 retail stores and shop-in-shops.

Several international vendors

The customer continued to face concerns in its sourcing process

In an increasingly competitive lifestyle and fashion market, the customer continued to face concerns in its sourcing process. With multiple moving parts involved in sourcing from several international vendors, the lifestyle company was facing several challenges, including:

  • The lack of an effective management process to keep track of their suppliers’ performances
  • Distance, language barriers and cultural differences causing issues for the customer’s supply chain
  • Multiple touchpoints in their sourcing process gave rise to sub-optimal consolidation, creating additional costs

Global expansion ambitions

Maersk’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) experts were roped in to find a solution

The company was looking to tie up with an experienced and well-connected partner to help keep suppliers’ activities under control and aid in global expansion ambitions.

Maersk’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) experts were roped in to find a solution. Using its global reach and local expertise, the team set about providing visibility, designing, implementing and administering a vendor compliance program. The key areas the solution focused on were:

  • Implementing a supplier compliance program to manage vendors and their invoices on the customer’s behalf at the places of origin
  • Mitigate the supply chain risks caused by supplier non-compliance from the get-go
  • Continuously trace and drive supplier performance to meet target levels

Showing multiple benefits

As a direct result of the Maersk SCM services, the customer’s supplier performance improved significantly after just one year of having the program in place. The new process also showed multiple benefits to the customer, such as:

  • Exceeding the 90% target set for on-time documentation, booking and delivery
  • Reducing variability across the supply chain
  • Reduced expedited freight costs paid by the customer or suppliers
  • Improving origin dwell time and promoting on-time departure
  • Improving product availability performance
  • Driving positive vendor behaviour in the long run

Maersk’s integrated approach to ocean and logistics services provides them with a unique advantage - the ability to tailor logistics solutions according to the business requirements. It includes their expertise to handle the entire supply chain end-to-end, along with every disruption if needed.