Building a Better World: How a Leading Construction Chemicals Company Transitioned to Data-Driven Logistics
What do construction projects like NFL stadiums, major tunnels, and NYC skyscrapers all have in common? They were built with the same construction materials from one global chemical solutions company. The company delivers such materials to construction and building repair worksites. As demand has increased, so has the need for more delivery data to manage the movement of products, measure operational efficiencies and make better management decisions. With its data scattered in different systems (dedicated fleet provider / carriers), the company had little to no operational visibility, making it hard to pinpoint inefficiencies.
In the construction hauling business, tracking trucks and products is essential because every minute of downtime is money lost. Visibility into inventory at plants provides a good understanding of the actual inventory needs relative to the production schedule. This allows companies to route fleets accordingly. This was a major challenge for this chemical solutions company.
“Were we planning the best kind of routes?” “What areas were we operating well?” said the company’s project manager of supply chain and customer service when addressing some areas they wanted to focus on.
In addition, their planning and routing was done manually, which is not uncommon in the industry but is highly inefficient. The company needed an innovative solution for managing inventory and routing data.
They found the solution in ORTEC’s data-driven logistics technology and expertise.
Better Visibility, Better Results
The construction industry is moving toward data-driven technology in general. Companies in the sector are now focusing on big data, AI, and machine learning to boost productivity, drive revenue, and enhance operational visibility across the supply chain.
To achieve this, the company leaned on ORTEC’s data science and consulting teams for analytics insights and data-driven solutions. They chose our Performance Analysis App enabled with the Big Data Portal and Inventory Routing technology solutions. These tools use automated data capturing rather than manual inputting numbers, which leads to faster and more accurate results.
The Big Data Portal is an online portal for analytics as a service that combines data storage, processing, analysis, and advanced visualization in a user-friendly interface. Performance Analysis shows what the company was expecting with its planning process against actual results, enabling them to create more reliable plans. ORTEC Inventory Routing is a powerful tool that supports demand forecasting and route planning through product transportation and distribution. This routing solution helps them keep shipping costs low and create more accurate delivery routes.
“We immediately got a lot more visibility with ORTEC’s routing solution and their Analytics Apps like Performance Analysis in the Big Data Portal,” said the company’s project manager of supply chain and customer service. “We were able to develop custom analytics. We use the solutions at each step of the(planning and delivery) process. For example, we can see how our plants are doing with fulfilling order volume and how our planners can plan that order volume onto trucks.”
The company can also drill down into truck-trailer-driver combinations and see if there are low-performing drivers or long routes to adjust its planning process.
The company’s portfolio includes a variety of materials for construction companies. With such an expansive portfolio, it is critical to track all delivery information. For instance, they need to know if a truck leaves the main highway route to avoid traffic or when it reaches a jobsite.
According to the project manager of supply chain and customer service, data-driven logistics also gives them the ability to dig into their plants to see if they were performing optimally, which creates real value.
Project Manager of Supply Chain and Customer Service at Global Construction Chemicals Company
"Some of the key benefits we are seeing from using data-driven logistics are definitely more cost-effective delivery routes and the big one is improved transparency into our operations."
Data-Driven Technology That’s Easy to Integrate
“Better decision making.” “Enhanced planning and routing processes.” “Cost efficiency.” “Better service.”
These are some results the chemicals company has experienced working with ORTEC’s data-driven solutions.
Sometimes it can take a long time to garner benefits from working with a large amount of data, as it can be time consuming and taxing to integrate systems. That was not the case here.
The company’s data integrated “pretty seamlessly into ORTEC’s solutions,” making them easy to work with to get results, said the company’s project manager of supply chain and customer service.
Planners could extract and analyze their data with ease. There was no need to export data from several enterprise resource planning tables and then combine.
The company controls all the reporting and underlying data, making it significantly easier to drill down into the numbers and figure out how they are doing.
A Concrete Example of Overcoming Challenges with Data-Driven Logistics
With sites across the U.S. and Canada, there were many challenges ahead of the project going live, including providing remote support to an entire team of planners and terminal managers. Team members worked long hours to meet tight deadlines.
Halfway through the project, the teams implemented JIRA (project management software) to track defects, tasks, and improvements. This tool greatly improved the team’s ability to track daily priorities.
That combination of dedicated people and powerful tools proved to be very helpful to move the project forward during the pandemic.
“The support we received is top notch,” said the company’s project manager of supply chain and customer service. “In addition to providing thorough training and data triage, the support team collaborates with us to make meaningful analyses and address the complexity of our business.”
