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Transportation logistics at Welch’s

MM: In the case of Welch’s, you talked about what again?

MB: That one was transportation logistics. Trucking, basically. They have to ship their goods on trucks from their plants to their customers’ warehouses. It’s a somewhat complex world out there in trucking. You have some customers that handle customer pick-up and drive their own truck to your factory. Other times, you have to schedule and hire trucks from a variety of carriers that deliver your products to the market.

Optimizing shipments for consumer packaged goods companies, like Welch’s, can save a lot of money… A meaningful fraction of their revenue is spent on transportation costs. Companies can optimize that by assuring your trailers’ utilization is high, or by comparing accessorial charges which are the extra charges like fuel surcharges, costs for unloading of goods by the driver at customer locations, trailer storage, and so forth.

They can optimize these across carriers to see if any carrier’s charges are out of line by analyzing shipment patterns to see where load-leveling may be out of balance. By having carriers report actual time of delivery to your customers through a Web-based tool, you can analyze on-time delivery performance, and company to have the capabilities of larger competitors at a fraction of the cost through these SaaS Web-based solutions.

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