An ICAT Logistics Case Study Streamlining for a Tier One Supplier

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A Program Manager (PM) is an important asset to a company, especially in the automotive industry. The PM is responsible for overseeing a new program from beginning to end, and will monitor and report progress throughout the process. For one automotive company, confusion ensued and caused drastic discrepancies in their supply chain due to multiple PM’s involved in the logistics part of the business. When they realized how much money they were losing on the transportation side of the company, they reached out to ICAT Logistics for help.

Because this company was a tier one supplier, they were shipping directly to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). For this reason, they needed the experts at ICAT to:

• Streamline the flow of information between the PM’s;
• Reduce overall transportation costs; and
• Create a system that generates a reference number to be used as a freight cost identifier and assign this number to a particular job.

Right Solution

The ICAT team gathered all the relevant information, reviewed what was needed to make the necessary changes, and created the following solutions for this automotive supplier:

• Appointed a customer service representative (CSR) who scheduled and routed all inbound and outbound freight;
• Worked directly with the PM’s on a daily basis to meet their needs, schedule orders, and provide tracking information;
• Collaborated with the customer to create an “FIS” (Freight Identification System) that assigns quoted costs to each individual shipment, alleviating variances;
• Provided an LTL option, as well as an expedited shipping option; and
• Sent daily reports to the PM’s with freight costs and delivery status updates.