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Baltimore Bridge Collapse: How a Fortune 500 Manufacturer Used Logistics Command & Control to Avoid Disruptions

January 16, 2025

KPIs

20%

Improvement in On-Time Delivery

10%

Savings on Shipment Costs

25%

Improvement in Planner Productivity

Overview

The customer, a Fortune 500 company specializing in large industrial lifts for the construction industry, has experienced sustained double-digit growth over the past five years. However, many of their suppliers have struggled to mature at the same pace, creating challenges in managing supply chain complexity.

Customer Challenges

The customer faced limited visibility into their overseas shipments and their impact on plant operations. With over 7,500 annual ocean shipments, primarily destined for the East Coast, disruptions such as the Red Sea Houthi attacks, the Panama Canal drought, and the recent Baltimore bridge collapse posed significant risks. These events threatened to create substantial downstream impacts, hindering the customer's ability to meet rising production demands.

Scope of Implementation:

  • 86,000+ Parts
  • 6,000+ Purchase Orders per Week
  • 2,000+ Shipments/Containers per Week
  • 4,100+ Suppliers
  • 23 Plants
  • 377 Planners
  • 47 Users

Solution

TADA implemented its Logistics Command & Control solution, with a focus on its Intelligent Material Tracking use case. This application had several capabilities that helped this customer solve this complex problem:

Production Impact:

By leveraging AI and connecting to the Purchase Orders, Production needs, and on-hand inventory at each plant, TADA can predict which part number had the highest probability of shutting down each plant and prioritize the visibility of ocean shipments to those parts.

Real-time visibility:

TADA provides real-time visibility and tracking over every part on the ocean (not just shipments). The planners, buyers, and logistics analysts can track the approximate GPS location of every part and know if the part followed the Red Sea path, the Cape of Good Hope path, or the Panama Canal path.

Lead Time Analytics:

Customer has real-time data on lead time by lane as well as volumes by lane. This will help them with two things:

  1. Forecast containers by lane for annual ocean container bidding.
  1. Adjust system lead times to reflect accurate days and avoid planning mistakes.

Exception Management:


TADA's AI algorithms help the customer get alerts on true exceptions prioritized by risk and avoid worrying about every shipment that is delayed.

Scenario Planning:

Customer can leverage TADA's scenario planning capability to understand impact on production if demand fluctuates within the execution window.

Results

Baltimore Bridge Collapse:

The customer was able to mitigate the Baltimore bridge collapse by predicting the ships that needed to be rerouted and prioritized as well as expediting other parts to ensure production is not impacted. Estimated on-time ship impact avoided - 20%.

Container Forecasting:

Customer can save millions of dollars by accurately predicting containers needed for each lane for the annual bidding and minimize or eliminate booking containers using spot rates. Estimated cost avoidance - 10%.

Planner Productivity:

Prior to TADA, planners and buyers usually have to look at an impacted part number, start searching for all shipments manifesto pdfs to see if that part is in the list and then understand how many days before they can receive the part. This is a cumbersome process that will impact their productivity. Planners can save at least 80% of their time in this process.

Conclusion

Shipment visibility has limited benefits. Part visibility is the ideal state in complex manufacturing environments, especially when each planner is responsible for hundreds of suppliers and thousands of parts. TADA's Intelligent Material Tracking system is built keeping the business needs, planner's standard work, and manufacturing complexity in mind. It can help mitigate Baltimore Bridge collapse size situations by saving hours and giving days or head-start compared to competition.