WEBINAR - HARNESSING REAL TIME TRANSPORTATION VISIBILITY PLATFORMS - February 16 - 11:00 EST | 17:00 CET
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Prysmian Group is a world leader in cable manufacturing, energy solutions, and telecom cables and systems. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, Prysmian operates in over 50 countries worldwide, across North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. The company employees some 28,000 employees and operates 104 plants.
The cable solutions market is highly competitive, particularly in Europe and Asia and since product offerings are similar amongst market players, service has become a key focus for differentiation. However, the quality of customer service that Prysmian’s teams could provide was suboptimal due to a lack of transparency across shipments and deliveries. Without access to readily available data on the status of shipments, staff were forced to spend considerable time calling and emailing their logistics department to confirm whether goods were on their way to customers.
Prysmian also found it challenging to accurately forecast customer orders, which is critical for ensuring a reliable supply of product. Prysmian used to rely on its customers to provide these forecasts, which varied greatly in terms of accuracy and reliability from one customer to the next, meaning the company had poor visibility of customer stock levels and sell-through rates. This made it difficult to predict or rapidly respond to changes in demand, making it hard to replenish inventory levels efficiently.
“The flexibility of Shippeo’s platform to integrate with other supply chain management solution providers like SAP created powerful ways for us to not only improve our overall efficiency and visibility in the chain, but also allowed us to provide our customers with additional services. As the MMS Telecom business is very customer service driven, we valued the ability to add the Shippeo tool into our Customer Centricity program. With Shippeo, we're showing the market that we're continuing to innovate within the supply chain and are offering best-in-class services toward our customers.”
As part of a wider digitalization project, Shippeo’s real-time transportation visibility platform has offered Prysmian another way to capture and aggregate data, and make it predictive, to aid the business in having greater operational visibility. This was a key requirement for optimizing business processes and in turn maximizing profitability.
Better visibility has enabled Prysmian to become increasingly service oriented. Powered by Shippeo’s platform, Prysmian launched a track and trace solution to provide real-time information about deliveries, from loading through to proof of delivery, as well as ETAs. The platform also automatically sends updates via email and SMS to all relevant stakeholders, to keep everyone aligned on a delivery’s status. With access to this up-to-date information, Customer service staff can avoid back and forth over email and phone with the logistics department and can now better respond to inquiries about deliveries. This also saves staff considerable time, allowing them to focus on their core responsibilities.
The objective data collected on the movement of shipments is also fed into scorecards, used to measure customer oriented KPIs such as OTIF so that they can be closely monitored and improved over time. They also play a key role in aiding tightly controlled production planning processes. Additionally, the data on transportation performance aids contract discussions with freight forwarders.
Prysmian staff can access Shippeo’s portal to view all orders and their status in real-time. In addition, Prysmian’s customers are also provided with access to their own light version of Shippeo, offering them visibility across their deliveries, which is increasingly becoming an expectation within the market. The ability to easily see the status of their incoming deliveries is a great value-add for customers, while helping to differentiate Prysmian’s offering. Here users can customize their own notification settings, where they’re able to decide what, when and how they want to be notified about deliveries.
Finally, by taking advantage of Shippeo’s partnership with SAP, Prysmian has been able to combine their inventory management systems, along with those of their customers, with real-time transportation data to achieve visibility of inventory across their entire distribution network. This gives the Prysmian much greater visibility of what their customers are selling and ensures the stock quantities recorded are in sync across ecosystem partner systems. If a distributor sends an order, it can now be immediately created in their inventory management system. This in turn allows for more automated processes and a more robust and useful solution compared with the EDI-based system they used in the past. Now, when their customers achieve a higher sell through rate than expected, the forecasting tool can be used immediately to plan and adjust orders.
Prysmian’s new track and trace system, powered by Shippeo, provides real-time data and insights that help to reduce customer inquiries and delivery delays by improving on-time delivery. The integration of real-time transport visibility with their inventory management systems has also helped reduce stock outs, improving sell-through and increasing revenue and, in turn, boosting NPS and customer loyalty.
Hear from Jack Mulder, the Logistics Director for BU MMS Telecom Solutions at Prysmian Group about how they leveraged Shippeo's real-time transportation visibility to build a customer-centric supply chain through transportation.
Highly competitive market with commoditized product makes innovations in customer service critically important.
Shippeo’s real-time visibility along with integration with SAP allowed Prysmian to boost sell-through rates while increasing customer loyalty.
