Forvia

World's #1 automotive seating component manufacturer

Forvia Seating is the global leader in automotive seating components and complete seat design and assembly. Highly regarded throughout the automotive industry, they are an innovative producer of an extensive range of seat products. From seat covers, to foams and accessories, seat electronics and advanced mechatronic systems, they produce components for many of the world’s largest car brands, including BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes. As the number one manufacturer of seat structures and mechanisms for cars globally, spread across 74 production sites in 23 countries, the scale and nature of their business presents many challenges for their supply chain operations.

‍

High stakes for JIT deliveries

Their customers demand reliable and consistent deliveries of seat parts to sustain their JIT manufacturing processes. The nature of Forvia’s operations results in a highly complex supply chain with three key challenges. Firstly, unexpected waiting times or extra distances travelled by carriers were resulting in additional carrier costs. Secondly, the costs of production line stops if a component’s supply is disrupted are very high. Thirdly, they incur high penalties for unanticipated late deliveries. By overcoming these 3 challenges, both customer satisfaction and profitability levels are likely to increase significantly.

‍

The first real-time land transport tracking in the auto industry

So how does a company like Forvia limit supply chain risk and create a competitive advantage by increasing resilience? Forvia selected Shippeo to give them, their carriers and their customers instant access to predictive and real-time visibility of all deliveries and solution combines four processes to achieve this. Shippeo’s solution relies on advanced technologies and integrations with existing tools and systems, delivered in a simple and intuitive way.

‍

Forvia and Shippeo are operating the first real-time tracking system for land transportation in the automotive industry - based on a 140,000+ carrier network, and an innovative machine learning ETA calculation, specifically designed for road transport and its unique constraints. Successfully deployed to all European plants from Forvia’s supply chain operations department in Poland, Shippeo is directly integrated with their existing systems, and tracks all European flows, regardless of region (Shippeo is present in 24 European countries) or language (25+ spoken amongst the Customer Support Team). Shippeo directly integrates with all 180 carriers using more than 40 tailored API connections, tracking 17,000 TOs per month. Over 40 users across chain use the platform each day. The portal is accessed approximately 1000 times per week.

The platform isn’t just creating value for Forvia. It also creates value for their partners and customers, both internal and external, improving customer satisfaction by better managing each party’s expectations. Apart from improving overall efficiencies across the supply chain, the real-time communications, sent automatically, allow Forvia’s customer teams to take proactive measures swiftly and reduce any transportation risks.

‍

Avoiding penalties and line stops

Shippeo has been a direct source of cost optimization for Forvia. By tracking dwell times anticipating delays, they can better avoid penalties and line stops. “Our customers, including BMW, Porsche and Mercedes, demand extremely reliable and consistent deliveries of our seat parts to sustain their JIT manufacturing processes,” says Forvia’s BG FAS Transport Director at Dominik Sczepanski. “Shippeo not only allows us to better measure any transportation inefficiencies across our 74 production sites, it has also helped us optimize our costs. By tracking dwell times and anticipating delays, we can better avoid penalties and line stops. The platform’s also proven to be a useful resource optimizer, enabling refined tracking of any transportation inefficiencies, and providing the data needed to create optimal milk-runs, for example."