Quick Results
Product quality, product innovation, customer service and a commitment to tomorrow are principles at Rockline Industries, the largest supplier of coffee filters and private-label baby wipes in North America. It supplies some of the world's biggest retailers, earning "vendor of the year" recently from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and has plants in four countries, customers in 50 and employs 1,900 workers worldwide.
In order to stay competitive, Rockline identified a need to reduce transportation cost as percentage of sales, increase visibility to carriers and proactively monitor key performance indicators. Meanwhile, the company was grappling with whether to implement a transportation management system before or after its planned ERP implementation.
"We decided that we needed transportation improvements as soon as possible," says Matt O'Connor, director of logistics at Rockline. "There were a number of things we needed to know. How much does it cost us to serve our customers, be it supply chain costs, line haul or assessorial charges? How do we improve on time performance through EDI? Can we connect, track and trace customer service and integration? Can we monitor KPIs and track our spend and demand mix changes and on-time deliveries?" O'Connor adds.
SPEEDY RECOVERY
After selecting JD Edwards as its ERP system provider, Rockline selected Logility Voyager Transportation Planning and Management for its automated transportation management system (TMS) solution.
After selecting JD Edwards as its ERP system provider, Rockline selected Logility Voyager Transportation Planning and Management for its automated transportation management system (TMS) solution.
Rockline decided on a twopronged strategy for implementing the Logility solution. With a focus on shipment planning and limited integration, Rockline integrated Logility with its legacy system to extract orders on a daily basis, implementing only the load building and optimization component of Logility.
With this approach, Rockline implemented the system in less than six weeks and started running orders and planning shipments through the system. Rockline reduced its transportation costs while tripling its multiple stop consolidation and optimizing carrier selection.
Logility's implementation consultant spent 19 days on-site to help Rockline plan the "quick results" strategy and work through some of the training and business process issues. "You don't have to spend a whole bunch of IT money and resources to implement Voyager Solutions and get immediate benefits," says O'Connor.
FULL INTEGRATION
With the "quick results" implementation completed, the transportation and logistics team turned to the largescale JD Edwards implementation that was underway. While cost savings were top of mind, the focus of the integrated ERP/TMS was on an efficient, reliable business process that resulted in improving service, providing visibility to management through weekly reporting and enabling proactive decision-making.
With the "quick results" implementation completed, the transportation and logistics team turned to the largescale JD Edwards implementation that was underway. While cost savings were top of mind, the focus of the integrated ERP/TMS was on an efficient, reliable business process that resulted in improving service, providing visibility to management through weekly reporting and enabling proactive decision-making.
According to O'Connor, "Our goal was to increase rail and truckload shipments, reduce the amount of less than truckload shipments, increase shipment size, decrease distance traveled for each load and cost per ton mile." He continues, "Most importantly, we're identifying opportunities where we're over-spending. Logility enables us to performthe freight analysis cost-effectively and easily. We have centralized all of our transportation functions with this pliable system, and have found tremendous value at a low cost." //