Background
- Asia-Pacific manufacturing operations of a global chemical company was struggling to make on-time deliveries, carried excessive inventories, and had excessive freight and logistics expenses (primarily from expedited shipments)
- EWA was engaged to identify operational problems and to develop/implement corrective actions to improve logistics & supply chain processes
Approach
Step 1: Onboarding & Alignment
- Gain thorough understanding of client’s overall business, markets, manufacturing operations, current supply chain, and logistics network
Step 2: Model current state of client’s supply chain and logistics operations
- Current logistics network
- Process assessment
- Determine customer requirements
- Organization structure analysis
Step 3: Analysis to identify required changes and potential opportunities
- Performance
- Voice of Customer
- Processes
- Organization Design
Step 4: Develop recommendations and action plan
- Short term actions
- Medium term actions
Step 5: Hands-on implementation
- Interim Supply Chain Manager
- Develop RFP for logistics services
- Implemented significant organizational changes
- Support transition of new organization & process (bi-weekly project implementation meetings)
Results (Outsourced Product Line)
- Savings achieved through rate negotiation & reduction in expedited shipments
- Carriers were consolidated & outbound logistics processes were improved, with 15% reduction in freight costs
- Improvements were made to forecasting & planning generated the expected results
- Inventories were reduced by nearly half, generating US$MM cash
- Customer service levels improved dramatically
- On-time deliveries improved to > 90%
- Organization stabilized & capabilities improved