The Eckes-Granini Group is a leading European producer of fruit juice. With a turnover just shy of €1 billion, the company sells roughly 850 million litres of beverages each year. Within Germany, Eckes-Granini is the leading supplier. Their products are distributed to over 650 customer delivery sites by 40 carriers, making a total of 35,000 deliveries per year.
As is the case for many manufacturers, Eckes-Granini’s distribution costs were covering not only outbound deliveries of goods, but also the empty runs returning. In the same way, CO2 emissions were also being generated to move an empty truck. Eckes-Granini selected Shippeo to enhance its operational efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and initiate a virtuous circle for the benefit of retailers and carriers.
“After initially working with Shippeo on the ECR award, we’re now thrilled to be embarking on this long-term partnership. Our partnership with Shippeo is of strategic importance to us. In addition to increasing customer satisfaction, the collaboration will enable us to achieve our ambitious environment and economic goals. Furthermore, we strongly believe that the Shippeo partnership will also have a positive impact on the whole supply chain, especially with carriers and retailers.”
The predictive and real-time visibility of goods delivery provided by Shippeo helps Eckes-Granini achieve three goals: First, it reduces loading times and optimizes operations at Eckes-Granini locations. Retailer satisfaction is also increased through shorter waiting times at unloading points, enabled by proactive ETA notifications and better availability of goods to customers. Carriers benefit from more efficient operations thanks to reduced downtime and empty runs.
In addition, Eckes-Granini and Shippeo have launched a truck space sharing project in cooperation with the German hypermarket chain Kaufland to avoid empty runs and idle time in logistics. Using a combination of Big Data and machine learning, Shippeo was able to calculate the optimal supply chain between Eckes-Granini's warehouses and Kaufland's locations. As a result, Eckes-Granini successfully reduced its CO2 emissions by 25 tons per year and cut its transportation needs by 40%. This was recognized in September 2019, when all three cooperation partners won the ECR Award, along with freight forwarders Glatzel and Meiberg.
Strict slot management rules by their retail clients were resulting in very high penalties each year while transporting a large number of empty runs for return journeys.
Leverage real-time visibility to reduce loading times, streamline operations and increase carrier efficiency while reducing their carbon footprint.