How a global retailer for baby carriers achieved full visibility into its global supply chain

Results after the limbiq implementation

• Distributed SCM Team able to collaborate with partners along global supply chain globally
• Significant reduction of non-value-adding tasks and e-mails
• Gained full visibility into the global supply chain
• Able to react to changes in the supply chain more quickly
• Quick partner and supplier onboarding

Determine a single source of truth

The global retailer’s products are sold in more in hundreds of retailers in over 50 countries. To ensure this success and high quality standards, they rely on global supply chains. They are ranging from the US to EMEA with production and suppliers located in Europe and Asia.

The teams involved in sourcing, producing and shipping are mostly remote. They work with the production facilities in Europa and Asia. These global teams communicated via e-mail and spreadsheets for updates about orders, shipments and adjust the production planning.

Working in this fashion, the teams faced a series of challenges in their daily business:

• Updates of spreadsheets came so often that it was very difficult to track updates.
• Critical information could easily be missed in e-mails.
• The scattered inventory of information and documents across e-mail, excel and PDFs did not help matters when it came to troubleshoot problems in the supply chain.
• There was no single-source-of-truth or common platform for all parties to retrieve critical information .
• The lack of visibility and ability to act would further make it difficult to plan production and distribution.

With the rising challenges to the global supply chains due to inflation and cost pressures, the team needs to increase productivity and the ability to adopt flexible to ever changing supply chains.

Adopting to ever changing supply chains

The constant challenges from changing global supply chains required to collaborate closer with internal and external partners and be able to adapt to changes in the supply chain to avoid disruptions in production and distribution.

In order to reach this state, the company needed to gain visibility first and therefore developed a requirements list and implementation plan to achieve these strategic objectives:
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Processes

They needed to establish digital processes and collaboration for the distributed internal and external teams. Every team member should have access to the latest information instantly.
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Pro-active vs re-active

It was very important to receive updates about deviations proactively in order to take timely measures instead of having to read or skim through spreadsheets or e-mails.
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Flexibility

The solution should provide a flexibility that allows to adapt to changing global supply chain structures like switching

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Site by Site roll-out

The company started the global roll-out by introducing the platform site by site. For each site or factory, limbiq mapped the order and shipment documents. This enabled everybody to fully automate the import of documents without manual intervention. Thus eliminated the need for e-mails and spreadsheets.

Then, an education session for the users in the site or production plan was scheduled. After a short user training sessions, the site or production plant were ready to work in limbiq.

By adhering to such a roll-out schedule, they achieved that the global team was onboarded onto limbiq in a short timeframe.

Today, employees from the company and the partners are using the platform daily to exchange information.

Collaborative End-To-End Supply Chain Management

With the help of limbiq, the global supply chain group at the company is now running full speed ahead. All relevant stakeholder now have an easier time supporting decisions and communicating value:

• limbiq has significantly reduced the time it takes to communicate between the stakeholders and to find the relevant information in e-mail and spreadsheets.
• Changes in the supply chain, that previously took weeks, are now a matter of days as everything is digital.
• limbiq enabled the company to flexibly react to any changes and pursue their global supply chain strategy with a flexible and collaborative platform.