Customer: The customer is a supply chain management services company whose solutions connect and enable multiple, complex networks to reduce costs and drive efficiencies. The company was formed as a joint venture between the largest domestic auto manufacturer and a $3.7 billion management company of global supply chain services. Since 2001, they have successfully implemented supply chain solutions for the auto manufacturer worldwide, enabling them to save millions of dollars in their logistics and inventory costs while streamlining their supply chain.

Project: Outbound Logistics: Supply Chain Visibility and Compliance

Scope: ServerLogic provided the project management, application design support and development skills to a leading 3PL in a highly integrated project which provided supply chain outbound vehicle logistics inventory visibility. The project scope included providing the infrastructure to connect worldwide disparate systems into a common format for capture, processing and storage in a central database. The system provided the capability to monitor vehicle inventory movement (by rail, truck and ocean) from assembly plants to automotive dealerships located in North America including Canada and Mexico. The project was taken from requirements gathering through each of the steps in the Systems Development Methodology to deliver the following core system functionality:

Logistics Pipeline Reporting

• Provides screen navigation to pipeline statistics, carrier/route performance metrics, vehicle distribution inventory, EDI Event management and rail transportation trip planning
• Provides daily summary statistics (actual versus target) of pipeline activity: total vehicles in pipeline, shippable vehicles by rail & truck, vehicle in-transit by rail, vehicle at distribution centers and vehicles shipped by ocean vessel
• Provides monthly and yearly transit averages
• Provides a global repository of vehicle inventory information

Rail Transportation Planning

• Provides an efficient mechanism for manual and automated generation of individual optimized rail trip master plans
• Creates rail transportation schedules (routing) for designated rail carriers
• Creates initialized trip instances which provide the data framework (routing information including milestones, notes, and constraints) against which Track and Trace reports shipment progress

Track and Trace (Including Event Management)

• Provides visibility to the entire outbound logistics supply chain from place-of-origin (plant) to final destination (dealer)
• Provides visibility at the rail/truck load level or by individual VIN: origin, current status and location DT, destination, ETA to destination, mode of transportation, carrier, order#, dealer ID and reporting region
• Supports exception management, compliance management & reporting
• Provides visibility to entire vehicle event history
• Provides visibility to vehicle inventory level and by VIN at a distribution center include aged status
• Identifies reporting event violations (trips potentially at risk due to events being missing, late or overdue)
• Provides early notification of supply chain failures requiring exception management

Compliance Management

• Creates reports and excel spreadsheet (scheduled, ad hoc) for carrier compliance management
• Captures and stores performance data used to generate reports regarding baseline, transportation, facilities, administration, and other supply chain elements
• Provides tools for capturing and retrieving information on operational exceptions

Value:   ServerLogic's project management team provided expertise to coordinate this complex systems development and integration project. Key benefits of the new system included decreased inventory levels, reduced delivery lead time, lower delivery cost, and enhanced service provider monitoring.

Engagement length: 36 months