For over a century, Nexans has played a crucial role in the electrification of the planet. Having generated 5.7 billion euros in standard sales in 2020, Nexans is a global player in energy transition, with a vision to “electrify the future”. With around 25,000 staff across 38 countries, the Group is leading the charge to the new world of electrification, making it safer, sustainable, renewable, decarbonized and accessible to everyone.
The Group is a leader in the design and manufacturing of cable systems and services across four main business areas: Building & Territories, High Voltage & Projects, Industry & Solutions and Telecom & Data.
Nexans’s global reach has resulted in an intricate and far-reaching value chain. The scale of Nexans’s operation makes collaboration between supply chain actors increasingly complex. Operating dozens of factories across the world and executing thousands of deliveries at any one time, Nexans faces disruptions every day. However, when customers aren't able to understand where goods are, or know who is responsible, it can affect Nexans's relationships with them.
The company wanted to focus their energy on certain customer segments and to improve the quality of service offered to key clients, to add more value within their value chain, increase margin and build strong long-lasting customer relationships. Delayed deliveries can disrupt customers’ businesses. However, simply increasing inventory buffers to ensure stock was always on hand and available for customers was not in line with their strategy, as they wanted to keep working capital to a minimum. For this reason, improved customer visibility of inventory and deliveries was needed.
They also experienced bottlenecks throughout the chain, with causes including delays in unloading deliveries when they arrived at customer sites unexpectedly. Nexans wanted to streamline their transportation activities, improve visibility and ultimately make their supply chain reliability as high as possible.
"The digitalization of our supply chain is an integral element of Nexans’s ambition to electrify the future. We started the journey towards enhanced traceability some time ago with initiatives such as our connected solutions. But now with Shippeo joining our expanding group of key strategic partners, we are taking the visibility of our transportation operations to the next level. A high level of transparency and traceability is regarded as the norm when ordering consumer goods online. Partnering with Shippeo allows us to offer the same kind of experience and confidence for our deliveries.”
The collaboration with Shippeo is helping advance Nexans’s strategic transition to an even more customer-centric organization, by implementing an innovative new digital service that leverages automation and artificial intelligence to expand future capabilities of its global transport operations. The tracking and ETA prediction service from Shippeo was implemented at the start of 2021 and is providing Nexans customers with real-time insights on transportation operations for increased transparency and traceability. It's also enabling Nexans to identify improvements across its value chain to increase the resilience of delivery ecosystems for customers.
Nexans new digital service powered by Shippeo uses automation and artificial intelligence to provide end-to-end visibility of its delivery operations from factory to customer. It provides instant information, reliability and sources of efficiency to Nexans customers with enhanced benefits from real-time delivery tracking, incident management and estimated time of arrival (ETA) predictions. In this way, the new visibility capabilities have been integral to the company’s overall strategy, not only relevant to supply chain, including transportation functions, but also to its sales, marketing, and customer service departments.
The partnership is helping Nexans to accelerate achievement of its goal of enhanced customer satisfaction and business evolution by creating an agile, data-driven supply chain supported by state-of-the-art technology. This focus on digitalization projects and improved visibility is enabling Nexans to deliver value-added services for customers such as real-time tracking (having achieved a 75% tracking rate already in Brazil) as well as accurate estimated time of arrival (ETA) predictions and incident management of shipments.
Nexans's Group Innovation Director for Digital & Grid, Olivier Pinto, discusses the ways real-time visibility of transportation operations is helping to improve customer experience and contribute to the company's wider sustainability objectives.
Nexans partners globally with Shippeo to provide real-time visibility of deliveries to customers worldwide.
High inventory buffers and supply chain bottlenecks due to lack of incoming delivery visibility.
Real-time delivery tracking capabilities providing instant information, greater operational reliability and efficiency to Nexans customers.