Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - October 2008 - (Page 38)

including planning, rating, routing and freight payment. From the beginning, Barilla was able to monitor carrier performance, optimize transportation rates and routes, find consolidation opportunities and settle its transportation bills. “One of the main reasons we selected LeanLogistics is that five years ago, they were the only technology that offered a true end-to-end solution,” says Evett. Barilla managed its transportation inhouse with the LeanLogistics solution until mid-2007, when the company decided to outsource the day-to-day transportation planning to LeanLogistics. Barilla has recently increased this outsourcing outsourced service,” she says. The provider is better able to identify empty miles in their network and then match shippers up to carrier capacity to take empty miles out of the system. While in some ways this outsourcing arrangement resembles the services of a 3PL, Evett points out that the provider is a neutral party. “LeanLogistics makes no money by linking us with any carriers, nor does it make any percent of the contract rates we negotiate,” she says. “LeanLogistics benefits by uncovering capacity opportunities and then being able to market their managed services to more and more shippers.” arrangement, so LeanLogistics has become Barilla’s managed transportation service. Barilla still has complete visibility to pricing, capacity and shipment status, but LeanLogistics personnel are handling the day-to-day operations. According to Evett, Barilla made the shift because its small team of internal resources limited its ability to keep up with the new technology and functionality of the LeanLogistics system. “We think we can leverage the full capabilities of the technology better as an An important part of its managed service is LeanLogistics’ TMS network, which is a community of many companies across a variety of industries that promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing among its members. Services include networkwide benchmarking and performance reporting. By modeling complementary networks, LeanLogistics can determine opportunities for inter-corporate continuous movements. By benchmarking network-wide coverage, rates and performance, it helps clients get the best possible service and costs from carriers. “We are able to improve the carriers’ utilization, while we are also able to reduce the shipper’s rates and improve its service,” says Chris Timmer, vice president of sales and marketing for LeanLogistics. Before the relationship began, Barilla had a totally manual system for everything from contract negotiation and administration to day-to-day rating and routing. Based on the negotiated contracts, each of Barilla’s DCs and 3PLs worked off of Excel spreadsheets that served as routing guides. At each location, a transportation planner and an appointment clerk did all of the phoning and faxing to carriers to tender the freight and schedule the appointments. During the transition to the LeanLogistics TMS, transportation continued to be decentralized, but within a year all transportation planning was centralized at its Illinois headquarters. While the managed service handles dayto-day operations, Barilla continues to negotiate its own contracts with carriers. “We want to maintain direct relationships with our carriers,” says Evett. “LeanLogistics has become our arms and legs. They execute the requests for proposal, enter all of the rates and routings into the TMS and administer the contracts. That gives us the time to focus on the relationship with the carriers. However, we expect that our negotiations with the carriers will now be three-party—Barilla, the carrier and LeanLogistics.” The shift to a managed service has also allowed Barilla to quickly add an appointment scheduling function, which had been deferred because of a lack of internal resources to implement. “As soon as we implemented the appointment scheduling module, we found much greater value than we expected,” says Evett. “We are looking forward to some of the other new functionality in the LeanLogistics solution.” Greatly increased visibility has been the best value of the relationship, Evett says. Barilla not only has a better view of its carrier performance and costs, but it has gained visibility of every shipment in the supply chain. “When we make an intra-company transfer from a plant to one of our DCs, we are able to see customer orders that are waiting for that stock to arrive,” says Evett. “We have internet visibility into the status of 38 OCTOBER 2008

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Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - October 2008

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