How a $35 Billion Fintech company digitized their supply chain and cut 10% of transportation costs
How a $35B FinTech company, digitized its global supply chain and cut 10% of its transportation costs with Orkestra.
With Orkestra, this Fintech company was able to:
The challenge
This innovative FinTech company is a leader in POS hardware and equipment, helping businesses of all sizes sell in person. They have grown exponentially and now ship millions of devices globally per year. However, with explosive growth, they faced challenges in scaling their supply chain to meet demand. They faced two main challenges: time spent on manual tracking and a lack of visibility into their operations.
- Time spent on manual tracking and a lack of visibility into their operations:
With a vast network of suppliers, forwarders, warehouse operators, and outbound carriers, they spent considerable time on manual inputs and tracking. They relied on spreadsheets, emails, and calls to get information from their partners, making it impossible to get a clear line of sight into the status of orders, shipments, and deliveries. In addition, they offered North American customers same-day delivery within a 24-hour window through various carriers, but they were unable to efficiently measure if their carriers were fulfilling their obligations.
- Managing inventory and stock levels:
The second major challenge was managing inventory and keeping appropriate stock levels. When shipping millions of units per year, it's easy to either underestimate or overestimate how much stock is needed. The struggle was that the FinTech company was relying on blanket orders to their manufacturers and lacked complete visibility over what the purchase order was for, what the manufacturing order stated, and what was actually delivered. With all three pieces of vital information siloed, the team occasionally found themselves unclear on their overall inventory levels.
The solution
By implementing Orkestra, the FinTech company could streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve customer service. Orkestra centralized all their data across logistics partners that were previously distributed across emails, personal computers, and in the heads of employees and partners.
For the first time, anyone within the company could get a clear picture of their supply chain and logistics operations in real-time. With the data and tools to manage their supply chain, the team could easily submit purchase orders, schedule shipments, and confirm delivery timelines. Plus, the best part about Orkestra is its carrier-agnostic platform, meaning all bookings can be handled regardless of carrier or destination.
As a result, the team at the FinTech company can leverage the most cost-effective carriers and still benefit from access to real-time data at both a shipment and SKU level. This gave their team more control over carriers and the ability to measure their performance in delivering on-time. Lastly, Orkestra gives teams custom metrics and reporting on orders, shipments, inventory, as well as costs. So now they get a view of their stock levels across their warehouses to effectively forecast demand and deliver same-day.
The results
With Orkestra, the teams at the FinTech company no longer face the consistent logistics challenges they previously experienced. They have seen a surge in productivity by eliminating manual tracking and chasing partners for information. Now, all their information is visible in Orkestra for the benefit of any internal team member, vendor, forwarder, or other supplier. This means no more errors from out-of-date information or multiple inputs, but complete transparency. Additionally, they were able to identify inefficiencies in their freight routes as well as the rates of their carriers with access to their data. As a result, the FinTech company was able to select cost-effective routes and carriers to cut 10% of their costs.