Key Objective: Provide clients with online access to review their stock and logistics movements within their logistics hub.
Culina Logistics provides strict temperature controlled integrated supply chain services for food & drink products that have limited shelf-life. The services encompass temperature-controlled warehousing, distribution, and transport solutions and it guarantees precise temperature maintenance throughout product storage and transportation.
Issues: As a distributor of time sensitive food products, Culina relied on everything running to schedule. Deliveries from multiple food manufacturers were given time slots, to ensure their goods were able to travel through the logistics facility in the shortest possible timeframe. The deliveries from the various manufacturers were then consolidated, and within the shortest possible time, shipped onward to the different supermarket dedicated distribution centres. From here, the products are once again consolidated, and delivered to the specific stores. If a delivery from a manufacturer was late, it missed its slot, and this often resulted in the manufacturers goods missing their scheduled Culina consolidated deliveries.
This would cause huge problems for both the retailer (empty shelves) and the manufacturer (lost shelf life). Each new day would often bring frustrated clients calling the Culina customer services team to say the manufacturers’ goods hadn’t arrived. To try and combat this, Culina’s seven-strong IT team had the job of processing data and crunching numbers for up to six hours every day to provide its clients with a report detailing their goods-in times, and respective deliveries to the relevant supermarket distribution centres across the UK.
However, this was a time and resource-heavy reporting process, meaning the problem of late deliveries was hard to evidence until it was too late. This was a major frustration for Culina and its clients, as in the confusion and information delay, transport providers would often be able to avoid accountability for not delivering on time.
Resolution: We developed a web-based software application which would provide an automated solution to the problem.
It provided Culina’s customer base with end-to-end visibility, in real time, of the arrival and upload time of all goods in, plus the departure time of deliveries out of its logistics hub. The Customer Portal / Goods Status Dashboard completely changed the dynamics of Culina’s relationship with its manufacturers, transport providers and customers overnight, because everyone in the chain had clear visibility of when, where, and how any delays to deliveries occurred and, crucially, where the fault lay. It meant Culina’s customer services team received fewer calls as retailers and manufacturers could see when a transport provider had let them down by late delivery of their goods into the logistics hub. And because, at the time, nobody else in the industry was using a bespoke business dashboard like the one we created, it quickly became a unique selling point for the business and a way to acquire new clients.