Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Transportation Management Systems (TMS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Glass
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Autonomous Transport Systems
- Public Transportation Management
About The Customer
Encore Glass is a company that transitioned from recovering, sterilizing, and recycling bottles to importing new glass and creating custom packaging for its customers. The company serves a wide range of customers, including small winemakers in remote areas, and has a commitment to fulfilling even the smallest customers' needs with exactly the right bottles, delivered just in time to be filled. In 2019, Encore shipped to customers in 241 cities from its facilities in Fairfield, California and on the East Coast. The company's transportation needs are linked to the agricultural rhythm of grape harvesting, which drives seasonal volatility.
The Challenge
Encore Glass, a company that transitioned from recycling bottles to importing new glass and creating custom packaging for customers, faced a significant challenge in managing its transportation operations. The company had identified experienced carriers to work with, but lacked the means to efficiently manage the relationships with these carriers. The sales and customer service teams were responsible for finding their own transportation solutions, including booking trucks, which was a time-consuming process. Furthermore, they often purchased transportation at a significant premium to market prices. The lack of a dedicated transportation team stood in stark contrast to Encore's commitment to customer service, which included fulfilling even the smallest customers' needs with exactly the right bottles, delivered just in time to be filled. The challenge was particularly acute when serving small winemakers in remote areas, who often lacked sufficient storage space.
The Solution
In response to the challenge, Encore Glass appointed Phil Russell, a former customer service representative who had recently moved to operations, to manage the company's transportation on a full-time basis. The company also partnered with Convoy, a Seattle-based digital freight network, in 2017. Convoy built a desktop solution for Encore that allowed Russell to offer loads to the 20-25 trucking carriers he preferred working with. This solution significantly reduced the time taken to book a load, from an hour to about 10 minutes. The partnership with Convoy made Encore's transportation operations more efficient, freeing up resources and time. This allowed the company to focus on what mattered most: carrier and customer relationships.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
Case Study
Vehicle Fleet Analytics
Organizations frequently implement a maintenance strategy for their fleets of vehicles using a combination of time and usage based maintenance schedules. While effective as a whole, time and usage based schedules do not take into account driving patterns, environmental factors, and sensors currently deployed within the vehicle measuring crank voltage, ignition voltage, and acceleration, all of which have a significant influence on the overall health of the vehicle.In a typical fleet, a large percentage of road calls are related to electrical failure, with battery failure being a common cause. Battery failures result in unmet service agreement levels and costly re-adjustment of scheduled to provide replacement vehicles. To reduce the impact of unplanned maintenance, the transportation logistics company was interested in a trial of C3 Vehicle Fleet Analytics.
Case Study
3M Gains Real-Time Insight with Cloud Solution
The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”