The Challenge
ROCKWOOL struggled for years with fragmented freight spend, visibility into ocean freight rates and reduced ability to benchmark the company's shipping costs against their competitors. In 2015 the company began exploring ways to leverage new systems and technology to overcome these problems.
“ROCKWOOL's primary challenges derived from international trade routes, particularly Europe to Asia, India to the Gulf, trans-Atlantic, and Intra-Asia routes,” said the International Category Manager Logistics for ROCKWOOL. “Managing freight spend for 55 TEUs on average per day was a logistics nightmare.”
ROCKWOOL needed the ability to quote transport rates for inquiries and shipments to customers. This meant contacting ocean carriers to obtain rates. The slightest change in shipment details could dramatically affect rates, drive away or leave customers dissatisfied, while also creating a loss for ROCKWOOL in transport.
Previously, ROCKWOOL had used non-vessel operating common carriers (NVOCCs) and third-party logistics providers, but ROCKWOOL did not have any real insight into how it ranked against the freight rates offered to other shippers.
A simple attempt to review the past year’s invoices would require a thorough review in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and countless hours auditing thousands of invoices. Still, ROCKWOOL would not have a granular view of spend, broken down to pre-carriage, ocean freight, OTHC, etc.
