Volvo looked to design and deploy a new transportation management system (TMS) that could serve as the backbone of its vehicle distribution network by planning, optimizing, and tracking shipments of all finished vehicles from its four global factories to 2,300 dealerships worldwide. Volvo established a list of goals for a transportation management system: bring consistency and efficiency to time-consuming, costly business processes, increase visibility across global operations, and improve agility and the ability to respond quickly to changing business dynamics.

Streck Transport faced several challenges in their transport management system. They needed to achieve higher efficiency in technical and software support by moving from an internally operated solution to a hosted version. Additionally, they required a solution to optimize the increasing print volume of customs documents. As a global transport services provider, Streck Transport sought a professional, reliable customs software solution with comprehensive IT capabilities for their daily core business.

Ace Hardware’s inbound transportation process was managed manually with spreadsheets, utilizing inefficient processes and producing outdated information. Ace wanted better control of inbound transportation to automate processes, gain efficiencies, understand costs, and identify areas for improvement. Ace was in the process of implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, a project that was expected to take three to four years and consume many IT resources. Meanwhile, the company recognized the potential ROI of deploying a transportation management system (TMS) and decided to slate the TMS project in front of the ERP implementation, with the goal of finding a TMS requiring limited IT resources. Ace established a list of goals for a transportation management system: gain visibility into true freight costs, identify and manage inbound freight, centralize freight payment, obtain business intelligence to assess carrier performance, and reduce freight costs.

With growth through mergers, acquisitions, and global expansion, transportation became increasingly complex for AEP. The company added multiple new product lines servicing both regional and long-distance markets in North America. The tremendous growth for AEP created challenges with logistics processes, which provided disconnects and missed opportunities. AEP had outgrown the returns process; service to internal and external customers was suffering, transportation costs were escalating, and increased visibility into freight movements was defined as a major opportunity. AEP established a list of goals for the transportation system and services: Bring transportation management in-house, Utilize a SaaS platform, Increase visibility with customers, Improve operational efficiencies and savings, Enable new modes of transportation.

Air Canada Cargo faced significant challenges in its global ground transportation network, including a lack of visibility, standardization, and stability. The trucking portion of the business was growing at about 20% per year, which presented additional challenges. The lack of standardization across different regions led to inconsistent procedures, and poor visibility into logistics information caused frequent settlement disputes with trucking companies. These issues required manual intervention and often resulted in long payment holds.

With a growing business, Barilla realized the current transportation management structure was unable to scale and support the pace of growth. They also recognized that their resources were not adequate enough to support future growth, and they needed to gain better control of transportation expenses and delivery service. The optimal solution for Barilla was an outsourced managed transportation service option, using TMS technology to help scale the business, lower overall costs, and improve visibility. Barilla established a list of goals for the transportation system and services: Gain centralized control of transportation, Increase visibility into shipments, Enhance real-time reporting, Improve scalability for growth, Lower transportation costs.

Cleverboxes needed a robust solution to manage a high volume of drop ship purchase orders across a large supply chain. They also wanted to standardize their fulfilment process with all of their suppliers. Some of Cleverboxes suppliers connected via CSV file transfer for order details and fulfilment information. Other suppliers operated through the manual process of PDF orders sent via email. The company needed to get rid of the reliance on emails and spreadsheets for faster, more accurate fulfillment. They also wanted a standardized process across their entire supply chain to maintain brand standards.

Yogurt consumption has almost doubled every seven years, making it one of the fastest-growing segments in a very competitive dairy market. Getting products on shelves as quickly and efficiently as possible is critical. For Dannon, this requires tracking hundreds of loads a day through its three manufacturing plants, six distribution centers, and numerous trucks from third-party carriers. In addition to the complexity inherent in Dannon’s supply chain process, customers were requesting better service through improved scheduling options and increased on-time deliveries. Dannon’s former outbound and inbound appointment scheduling process was manual and required time-consuming phone calls, faxes, and emails between departments, shipping facilities, and carriers. Additionally, the dock scheduler at each location was the only party with visibility to the entire transportation schedule, creating a bottleneck that limited the ability to communicate any delivery changes to the customers.

Jel Sert experienced issues from rapid growth, including an over-stressed transportation staff that manually processed over 25,000 orders annually. These manual processes included handwritten orders and using spreadsheets to manage transportation. Jel Sert missed opportunities for cost savings through freight consolidation. Orders were processed as received, then filled and dispatched sequentially. As Jel Sert grew, the transportation staff became a critical resource. Freight costs were not analyzed or optimized because of staff shortages. Rising fuel costs escalated transportation costs significantly and the increase in transportation costs drew the attention of senior management. Jel Sert established a list of goals for the transportation system and services: Reduced transportation spend, Incorporate critical legacy processes and data, Create new and improved business processes, Manage exceptions, Enable enterprise-wide visibility.

In the pharmaceutical business, the time from raw material extraction to delivery of a finished product can be protracted. Such was the case highest performing product for a global pharmaceutical company. Sold all over the world under different brand names, Isotretinoin is manufactured using ingredients sourced from multiple suppliers worldwide and is distributed from global packing facilities by both sea and air. The company set out to develop a supply chain strategy that would help ensure that Isotretinoin retained its top revenue-generating status in the market. Specifically, they wanted to understand the impact of different supply chain configurations, inventory, total costs and customer service. They partnered with Antuit and its team of supply chain optimization experts to explore how variables such as lead times, minimum order quantities, batch sizes, production yields, inventory buffer stocks and testing costs could impact service delivery performance and profitability.

Identifying customer demand, locating inventory in the right location, delivering the IBC and retrieving IBCs involves a complex series of decisions. Goodpack’s primary challenges were to improve asset utilization, reduce unproductive transport costs and decrease delayed or lost revenue. To address these challenges, Goodpack retained Antuit to transform their global S&OP process. The existing planning team lacked an analytical decision support engine that could enable optimal business decisions and as a result, drive effective sales and operations planning/ S&OP cycle. Specific challenges include: Systematic over or under forecasting due to lack of predictive forecasting for both supply and demand of containers/IBC. Suboptimal balancing of supply and demand leading to unproductive global movement of containers/IBC between depots. Suboptimal asset/container injection in the network. No automated allocation of inventory to sales order. What-if analysis to evaluate various scenarios on supply & demand balancing was lacking. Visualization and reports tracking business KPIs and data-driven insights were missing. Poor adherence to the global S&OP process by the sales and logistics team.

The restaurant chain, with close to 2,000 outlets across the country, had a loyalty card program that executives didn’t believe was living up to its potential. The program connected with approximately 20 million program members via email, delivering a mix of company news and updates along with special recommendations and product offers. Marketers particularly wanted to improve the quality and effectiveness of those emails and better understand the best messages and timing for customers, on an individual basis. The company approached Antuit to revamp the loyalty program in line with three primary business objectives: increase sales through larger ticket values, improve profit, and boost the number of transactions or customer visits, with the ability to toggle among those objectives on a flexible basis.

A regional supermarket chain needed to defend its market share against big-box, low-cost retailers and other price-driven providers. The retailer responded by matching the lowest prices in their markets, knowing this was not a viable approach long-term due to the negative impact on margin. For a sustainable advantage, the company needed a more effective and efficient promotion solution to improve its competitive position without 'giving away the store.'

The beverage company’s challenge in one of its key business units was how to improve margins through price adjustments without sacrificing market share. What made this so challenging is the alcoholic beverage sales rules in a particular geography that prohibits special promotions. The promotional techniques that could have accomplished the objective in other geographies served by the beverage company were off the table. The business unit realized it needed to better understand all pricing mechanisms and sales levers to determine the best strategy. The company approached Antuit to analyze sales data and build an advanced and competitive pricing model that could maximize margin, revenue, sales, and market share. This model would give the opportunity to adjust the optimization strategy by brand and channel where appropriate when considering a mix of pricing changes to accomplish the goal.

A large Canadian food retailer sought to advance their loyalty program by adjusting their direct marketing plan. The successful retailer aimed to be market leaders in personalized offers, however the marketing plan did not deliver the anticipated benefits, resulting in weak response rates and decreased vendor interest. To course correct, they pursued a more sophisticated offer matching engine to assemble relevant offers for their grocery shoppers. This entails the ability to match buyer persona and product by category and store, which dictates the specific offers buyers will receive, how to win back customers and identify upsell possibilities. One of the goals was to improve market positioning using personalization as a key means to growth. Additionally, the retailer realized after unsuccessful attempts that they did not have the in-house capability to do direct marketing at the scale and sophistication of a proven provider, so they engaged Antuit from previous proven programs such as streamlining the company’s input data, building a flexible targeting engine and increasing customer engagement. Antuit’s depth of knowledge in data modeling through SAS also had improved previous results.

The manufacturer only had access to high-level, manually-generated summarizations of product sales information, with little or no ability to drill deep into the sales numbers to understand which products, product families or geographic regions were performing as expected or not. Specific challenges included an 8-week manual process for product profitability analysis, no capability for high-margin product and inventory analysis, and a tedious 10-step process for approving extended payment terms.

One of the largest food retailers in Canada was experiencing weak response rates from its direct marketing efforts. Consequently, the retailer was looking for a more effective and efficient approach for developing promotions that improved shopper loyalty, increased store traffic, and improved margins. The retailer's leadership team sought a solution that could align promotional offers with specific shopper segments, integrating behavioral analytics and other purchasing variables into their promotional strategies.

Belk, a historic retailer with almost 300 stores and an online storefront, faced challenges in modernizing its internal planning and fulfillment systems. The company’s previous forecasting practices did not incorporate statistical modeling, relying instead on the average rate of historical sales (ARS). This made it difficult to capitalize on upward trends and minimize the impact of downward trends. Recognizing the value of advanced data-driven decision-making, Belk embarked on a $130 million smart technology initiative to better serve its customers. Building a predictive analytics capability was identified as a top priority, but the company also understood the challenges of changing long-held organizational processes.

A global electronics component manufacturer launched a sales and marketing data hub, only to find that it could not scale to handle the volume or velocity that its one terabyte of data presented. They needed an infrastructure that was easier, faster, and more reliable. The company had built a Hadoop data lake consisting of multiple disparate data sources of structured and unstructured data, yet they were unable to effectively leverage the data to create actionable business insights. The Hadoop implementation was also showing signs of performance issues. The organization turned to Antuit’s team of big data architects and engineers to improve the performance of their architecture and create a scalable platform for data consumption.

The beverage company encountered significant difficulties in sufficiently forecasting the impact of promotional decisions. The company lacked the insights to plan how far in advance to execute promotions. Their goal centered on the ability to make these forecasts six months ahead. By planning this far in advance, it helped them with key decisions such as which brands to promote, in which channels and how. This would also help with promotional investment decisions to reduce spend to maximize ROI. The beverage company wanted a solution that reduced decision turnaround time significantly and improve forecast accuracy to improve confidence in decision making.

A luxury e-commerce retailer based in Singapore was facing challenges in garnering repeat business and inspiring customer loyalty. Despite having a successful business operation across 8 neighboring countries, the company struggled to earn repeat business from customers, which is a common issue in the luxury retail sector where purchases are often discretionary and infrequent. The company had a wealth of customer data available through account creation and Facebook login, but this data was not being effectively utilized. They needed an analytics program to leverage this data for personalized customer engagement, a recommendation engine, and tailored offers to boost customer loyalty and optimize revenue.

Brooklinen, a leading e-commerce disruptor in the home essentials industry, needed an operational framework that could scale as they planned to expand their product offerings into new stores and regions. They required a system to streamline and automate their processes, centralize their data, and provide better visibility into the status of their goods. After raising a Series B of $50 million in March 2020, the company was poised for growth but needed the right tools to support this expansion.

Native, an eco-friendly personal care brand based in San Francisco and a P&G brand, faced several challenges in aligning their supply chain team. They needed to manage production timelines effectively, launch an eco-friendly line of packaging, and introduce new product categories. The complexity of these tasks required a streamlined approach to ensure that all stakeholders were on the same page and that the supply chain operations were efficient and transparent.

The Harry’s sourcing team actively searches for tools and systems that can supplement their dynamic supply chain in an effort to find more scalable ways to track data about suppliers, manufacturing, and shipments. The team has been piloting Anvyl in hopes of adopting an automated solution for increased transparency across the supply chain, specifically with production reporting and tracking. As part of the pilot, the sourcing team is starting to move purchase order data over to Anvyl’s Production Hub, so they can test it as a central place for everyone to see sourcing and production information.

Before Tervoort and his team found Anvyl, they were managing all of their supply chain operations in spreadsheets and over email threads. They knew they needed to cut down the hours they were spending on following up with suppliers and logistics partners, and they wanted more clear, effective communication between the finance and supply chain functions of Organifi. Tervoort envisioned a single dashboard where every stakeholder could find status updates on important production milestones, detailed supplier data, and an easily searchable history of conversations around orders and payments.

When Caraway was ready to launch its first eco-friendly product line in the summer of 2019, the team needed a way to quickly and efficiently monitor their production and shipment of ordered goods. As a new brand, Caraway did not have a large operations team in place to oversee every production milestone with its suppliers. The business needed to operate with a small but highly productive team as it looked to simultaneously produce and expand its product offering with other home goods.

Before Anvyl, COOLA’s supply chain information was fragmented. Purchase orders (POs) were created and emailed to suppliers, order statuses were manually tracked in spreadsheets, and important updates were communicated across multiple channels. Every change or revision to a purchase order – which happened 70% of the time – had to be manually updated across many systems, including their NetSuite ERP provider. For a company that issues more than 1,000 orders per year, shares over 5,000 files, and manages nearly 2,000 tasks, this inefficient approach took a toll on the team.

S’well, the leading insulated reusable beverage container company, had experienced nearly a decade of rising unit costs for its core products, as well as quality concerns within its supply chain. While the company wished to address these issues, it recognized that switching suppliers could be disruptive – especially amid high and growing consumer demand. To help solve these challenges, S’well asked Anvyl to evaluate its supply chain and identify cost savings opportunities for its core product offering, insulated water bottles.

Sock Fancy was rapidly expanding and needed to scale their supply chain operations. They faced challenges with inefficient communication with overseas manufacturing and design partners, lengthy email chains, lack of process visibility, and technological hassles. These issues made it difficult to maintain their quality of service with the anticipated 10x growth. Managing B2B accounts demanded significant time, leaving little room for other important functions like marketing, trade show placement, and design. The team spent hours following up with upstream supply chain partners to ensure quick and accurate updates for their enterprise customers.

As the pace of product innovation increases, startups face intense pressure to get products to market faster. hims, an early-stage, high-growth men’s personal care brand, sought to reduce its time to market for several new products in order to capture market share in an increasingly crowded category. hims tasked Anvyl with helping it rapidly develop a new supply chain for a variety of products. In the direct-to-consumer business, getting your products out to market quickly is critical to success,” said Hilary Coles Head of Product for hims. “We were excited to work with Anvyl because its team of experts could serve as an extension of our own – providing eyes on the ground at every stage of the sourcing and production process.