Ship Your Energy - How Shippeo’s Ocean Visibility Solution helps Siemens Energy energise society across the globe

At this year’s VisibilityNow, we got the chance to interview Kerstin Schauwecker, Logistics and Digitalization Professional with Siemens Energy, for a short customer testimony. Here’s what she had to say:

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Hi, Kirsten. So nice having you here at #VisibilityNow. Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself?
 

Sure, and many thanks for having me. I'm Kirsten Schauwecker, I work for Siemens Energy in our global logistics team in the digitalization area and I focus on our track and trace activities.

Now Siemens, of course, is a well-known global brand, a household name so o say. Can you tell us what Siemens Energy is about?

Siemens Energy is a global leader in the energy business. We energise society is across the globe. Roughly 16% of the global electricity generation is based on our technology. We support our customers along the entire energy value chain. This means low or zero-emission power generation, renewable energy transport and storage of energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption in industrial processes. We have roughly 91,000 employees working as a team in over 90 countries. Our logistics also operates on a global. This means we ship everything from tiny to large goods, such as turbines or generators, covering everything from standard logistics to over-dimensional cargo and heavy loads. We operate roughly 85 plants worldwide, and source from more than 5,000 suppliers globally.

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So “ship your energy” implemented Shippeo's Ocean Visibility Solution, and you actually prioritized ocean visibility over visibility for other modes. Can you tell us what drove this decision, and what challenges you faced during implementation?

Yes. So we piloted real-time tracking with Shippeo across multiple modes, including Air Road and Ocean, and we were really happy to see that Shippeo is able to track shipments across all modes, with ocean shipments being our top priority, which is why we focused our efforts on it during the last year. We have a strong focus on our supply chain and inbound shipments, making sure we receive direct supply on time, however, we do not operate in a just-in-time or just-in-sequence production mode. Hence, we don't have a primary focus on real-time tracking for road transportation. It's really the long lead time items that are very crucial for our plants. The longer the distance or the route, the likelier it is for disruptions or delays to occur, as it has been the case for everyone during the Covid pandemic over the last two years, whilst chasing shipments across the globe remains an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. 

In order to know the whereabouts of a shipment, we need to reach out to multiple partners, such as suppliers or forwarders. Real-time transparency is key and helps us locate a shipment and, moreover, have an estimated date of arrival, and this really relaxes our daily operations.

So we kicked off a project with Shippeo, monitoring inbound shipments predominantly from China to Europe and to North America. Within this scope, we experienced two major challenges. Firstly, to provide Shippeo with the data required for them to set up the real-time tracking out of our systems. The second challenge we faced, was that also our freight forwarders need to provide certain data to Shippeo as we do not capture all data in our system. So, for example, inbound from the suppliers into our plants. This means freight forwarders have to provide data, such as container references or SCAC codes, since we are unable to provide these to Shippeo, making it extremely crucial that this information is actually provided by our partners, in this case, our freight forwarders. Moreover, it was just as important to involve our partners in our project with Shippeo and share our approach with them, making sure, they would provide this data to Shippeo. So really the one major challenge we encountered, was to have all the necessary data in place and then provide it to Shippeo to set up the real-time tracking.

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So now, having overcome these challenges and successfully completed the first phase, what are the next steps of the project?

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Prior to completing the last steps in finalizing the project and negotiating how we would move forward, we initially had a look at the market and what was available, as we wanted a solution that was fast and hands-on. Based on our initial meetings, and the fact that we wanted to start quickly, we felt Shippeo was the right partner for us, especially since they offered to get involved in finding a solution and making it happen.

Our business environment is quite complex due to our multiple partners that need to be integrated and aggregating all data and information in the backend is something, we believe, Shippeo manages really well. It was straightforward throughout the entire project, especially thanks to the proactive and deeply involved project management team, which is really experienced with complex implementations. What we also appreciate a lot about Shippeo’s solution, is its front end and its easy-to-use and comprehended user interface. Moreover, it doesn’t take much training to get a hang of Shippeo’s platform as it’s quite intuitive - feedback I have received from many of my co-workers internally. Also, its design, and how information is displayed are clearly structured, along with a really modern interface.

So for the next phase, we're planning to enlarge the scale. We focused on inbound shipments during our first year. For next year we will focus on all sea freight shipments regardless of in or outbound from our plants, from our warehouses to our customers worldwide.

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Thank you, Kerstin, for this testimony. It was lovely hearing from you.

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Many thanks and have a good conference, everyone!

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For more information on Shippeo's multimodal ocean visibility or market-leading predictive shipment ETAs, please get in touch with our friendly team of experts.