Companies that ship products globally have to be supply chain experts, building exceptional market responsiveness, cost efficiency, risk management, and customer service into their business models.
Innovative freight forwarders can serve as true partners in accomplishing those objectives. With their deep knowledge of customer businesses, logistics expertise, and access to real-time data, freight forwarders can help their customers streamline their supply chains and use them as a source of competitive advantage.
Our services include:
- Network planning: Identify and maximize plant and warehouse capacities, increasing your responsiveness and rationalizing transportation flows. Benefits: lower costs and faster speed-to-market.
- Inventory control: Tighten inventory management to match fluctuating demand, reducing stockouts or overstocks. Benefits: maximized revenues, higher customer satisfaction, and lower costs.
- Supply contracts: Design pricing strategies to reduce order-shipment variability. Benefits: greater predictability and cost control.
- Distribution strategies: Perform a cost-benefit analysis of different distribution approaches to determine the most effective approach for meeting customer goals. Benefits: uncover new options, assemble creative logistics models and outpace the competition.
- Strategic partnering and integration: Help customers integrate with partners and customers to optimize their supply chains. Determine optimal level of integration, which information and processes should be shared, and how to implement new ecosystems. Benefits: greater agility and better competitive advantage.
- Outsourcing and procurement strategies: Perform an objective assessment on your supply chain capabilities and outsourcing opportunities. Benefits: pursue the most strategic opportunities.
- Risk management: Identify potential risks in your supply chain and develop avoidance, mitigation, or contingency plans to address them. Benefits: risk reduction and business continuity.
- Product design: Consider transportation impacts on product design, to reduce damage to goods in-transit. Benefits: lower costs, greater predictability, and higher sustainability.
Case Studies
Client: An oil exporter in Colombia
Client:
An oil exporter in Colombia
Challenge:
- Colombia is a region with poor infrastructure and security challenges
- Oil is a high-value product subject to theft, diversion, and adulteration
- Producers don’t want to release oil until they get paid for it
- U.S. refineries don’t want to pay for products they haven’t yet received
Approach:
- Serve as the logistics intermediary, assuming liability for oil in transit via an ownership transfer solution
- Secure shipping services at a port in Cartagena with the infrastructure to store crude oil
- Negotiate with a regional trucking company to do the runs
- Implement multiple weigh-ins, at the time trucks are loaded and when they arrive at the port
- Conduct 1,500 truck runs to fill the barge with crude oil volumes of up to 300,000 BBS
- Use a control tower with video, Google maps, and GPS coordinates of trucks to optimize truck deliveries and inspections
- Secure a revolving line of credit from a local financial institution to cover the cost of the oil purchase and ground transportation
- The refinery pays $5M to secure the movement of $30M worth of oil over the five days of truck transit
- The refinery takes possession at their terminal and pays the line of credit
Success:
- Design a complete logistics solution with financing, ground, and ocean shipping
- Pair a buyer and seller on terms both were willing to accept
- Design an innovative approach to dealing with real security issues in an emerging market