Windward AI Streamlines Le Chameau Logistics and Shipment Planning

Le Chameau’s supply chain manager (SCM) was tracking container status updates on multiple websites, including a vessel tracker, a cargo tracking website, a separate container tracking site, and a carrier website. That was, as she recalls, “an absolute nightmare,” taking up too much of her time. Additionally, it created a situation where the different teams along the supply chain received multiple, often conflicting, updates about containers’ routes and estimated times of arrival (ETAs).

Le Chameau is a retailer specializing in manufacturing top-quality, high-end rubber boots. Established in 1927 in the north of France, the brand has become popular over the years and today is a well-known brand with customers worldwide. They manage their supply chain from end to end, using freight forwarding services on their outbound shipments. 

Le Chameau synchronizes the flow of goods from the raw materials provided by multiple suppliers throughout Asia, to their manufacturing plant in Morocco, and from there to multiple distribution centers in Europe and the U.S. Overall, they ship around 250 TEUs per year.

The company was looking to make its entire supply chain operations more efficient by avoiding errors that occurred due to using disparate information sources. In addition,

Le Chameau knew that complex software drives low adoption rates, especially with teams used to working a certain way for many years. Plans to align the entire organization on a single source of truth made it paramount for the solution to be highly intuitive. 

They wanted to:

• Centralize all shipment tracking processes into a single platform.
• Create a company-wide source of truth for containers’ locations and ETAs.
• Ensure a quick and thorough adoption by all teams, including those without experience working with such technologies.

After trying out a few visibility solutions, the company chose to implement Windward Ocean Freight Visibility for two main reasons: 

• Best results in terms of real-time visibility and ETA predictions.
• Ease of use and visual aspect of the web application – this was an equally important decision factor.

A more streamlined and efficient supply chain

Two months after the adoption of Windward Ocean Freight Visibility, 15 colleagues are now using the platform, including the supply chain team in Casablanca and the company’s purchasing, accounts, production, product, and warehousing teams and management.

The impact could be felt on multiple levels:

• Shipment planning – Leveraging the full visibility the company now possesses – for an unlimited time, over all previously tracked containers, as well as access to port performance insights, including transit times and vessel turnaround times – they can make better forward-looking decisions. For example, transshipments that went through Barcelona were arriving significantly faster than those coming in via Valencia. This prompted the SCM to request that suppliers use the faster route as often as possible, resulting in a 20% decrease in shipment times.

• OTIF visibility and tracking – Enabling the manufacturing team in Casablanca to know and measure their OTIF rates with distribution centers across Europe, as well as understand where things did not go well, and pinpoint the areas needing improvement.

• Operational improvement projects – The SCM is using the 12 hours saved monthly on manual checks to review the efficiency across the entire supply chain, draft plans to improve processes and work on ensuring organization-wide conformity. Two months after starting to use Windward Ocean Freight Visibility, ten new operational improvement projects were drafted and successfully implemented.

• Preparing payments to suppliers – Accounts teams can see when a container shipped by a supplier is due to arrive, allowing them to plan ahead for when they need to process the payment.

Their outbound operations to the different distribution centers in Europe and the U.S. are much larger than inbound, and, after the initial period using the solution only on inbound shipments, the company plans to roll out Windward Ocean Freight Visibility for outbound as well, covering their entire maritime supply chain. That expansion is expected to have an additional impact on warehouse management, OTIF results, and overall efficiency and cost savings.

In addition, the company plans to begin leveraging Windward’s solution to help track, manage, and refute faulty detention and demurrage invoices, by accessing geofenced arrival and departure dates. Le Chameau also expects that accessibility to accurate ETAs will reduce wrongly booked haulage, which will help them reduce overall demurrage costs.