The pandemic affected every entity in their supply chain, leaving them with limited ocean freight
The customer sources their manufacturers in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore who come with several touch points for cargo release. They needed a state-of-the-art cross-border land transportation handling and distribution management system along with an experienced logistics partner to develop a robust model and implement it successfully.
Flexible and reliable solutions
Maersk and the customer worked together to implement flexible and reliable solutions that enhance their current processes and efficiency, through the pandemic and beyond.
- Reduced lead time and competitive costs: They streamlined the existing solution by building a cross-border milk run solution – a delivery method used to transport mixed loads from various suppliers in the warehouse, allowing the customer to move small quantities of a large number of items with predictable lead times and without multiplying transport costs.
- Increased Efficiency: They designed and customised the process flow based on volume data and historical movements to make it efficient.
- Reliability: Daily and weekly circular routes are now scheduled to ship items more frequently and in smaller lots in order to maintain schedule reliability and alleviate capacity issues with air and ocean transportation.
- Sustainability: Truck utilisation is at its maximum to further reduce cost and carbon footprint.
- Customs services: They work closely with the customer’s Customs House Broker to ensure that shipments arrive on-time for cargo releases.
- Visibility: End-to-end visibility with the use of Tradelens.
- Efficient storage: Reduce inventory holding levels in Local Distribution Centres (LDC) at the destination.
Minimising administrative work
Maersk's working style has enabled the customer to have an uninterrupted supply chain
With a collaborative approach from the countries involved, the solutions ensured the customer now has a single point of entry, visibility and control of the sourcing and consolidation process. This has led to an increase in management efficiency and a scalable solution that allowed for improved cost efficiency, less waste, reduction in transportation and emergency costs.
The solution gives the customer the confidence to plan their supply chain more efficiently, with agile predictability, while minimising administrative work to conduct bookings. The improved utilisation of trucks also lowered the transportation cost per cubic meter (CBM), and Maersk continues to mitigate exposure of cargo rolling over to effectively manage delays.
Maersk's proactive and innovative working style has enabled the customer to have an uninterrupted supply chain. This is a solid relationship that will only continue to flourish.