Border crossing: appliance manufacturer

Background

Schneider has had the pleasure of working with a leading manufacturer in the $100 billion global home appliance industry.

This organization manufactures and markets some of the world’s most recognized brands in kitchen, laundry and refrigeration appliances, offering convenience and innovation to families across the globe.

Situation

Like many businesses in 2009, controlling costs was a critical method of maintaining a competitive market position. To accomplish this task, Schneider was asked to help find cost reductions in their overall supply chain, but specifically in the cross-border traffic that is critical to their business.

Schneider solution

Based on volume flows, market conditions and Schneider’s extensive portfolio of services, we identified two areas in which the manufacturer could effectively reduce costs.

First, we adapted the current transfer service to a partial transfer by utilizing some customs benefits at the US-Mexico free trade zone. This reduced transfer costs on every load.
Schneider also helped eliminate a costly diversion process by converting all cross-border moves to our EZ-Border service. This eliminated the need to pay multiple carriers, incremental customs charges and other costs. It also allowed our customer to leverage the strength of Schneider’s carrier network, optimizing all cross-border moves in the supply chain.

Results

Schneider was able to reduce total cross-border spend. This also helped our customer optimize their supply chain, meet their business objectives, and maintain their competitive edge in the marketplace.

In addition, this program delivered an increase in efficiency for the customer’s logistics team. With EZ-Border, traffic managers needed to make only one call to the Schneider customer service team and the loads moved. The billing processes were consolidated from multiple invoices to a single bill from Schneider, making costs more predictable and easier to manage.