Ferrero partners up with FourKites to augment shipment visibility and tracking

As a chocolate and confectionary shipper known for various household name sweets––including Nutella, Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, and Tic Tac––Ferrero is intent on getting its shipments to its customers’ sweet tooth’s, or destinations, across multiple modes. And with that intent comes the need for a very high level for augmented supply chain visibility, something it had been struggling with.

That point was driven home by the company partnering up almost a year ago with Chicago-based FourKites, a provider of real-time tracking and visibility solutions across transportation modes and digital platforms, in which Ferrero implemented FourKites’ predictive supply chain offering across its North American supply chain to better track its truckload, ocean, and less-than-truckload (LTL) inbound and outbound loads.

As for how this collaboration works to better serve Ferrero, FourKites is leveraging its proprietary network of GPS/ELD telematics device partnerships, meshed with machine learning capabilities, in order to track real-time location and predict precise arrival times for each individual shipment that moves across the United States and Canada, with the platform subsequently feeding updates directly to key stakeholders through FourKites’ integrations with Ferrero’s three TMS providers.

Ferrero also will soon be utilizing analytics’ tools suite, entitled, FourKites’ Insights and Benchmarking, which identify trends, like detention time, on-time performance by carrier and variability across lanes, to find opportunities for optimization and improvement gains throughout its supply chain.

Glenn Lawse, vice president of supply chain at Ferrero USA, explained that a need for increased visibility was the driver for Ferrero to implement FourKites' predictive supply chain visibility offering throughout its North American supply chain.

“Ferrero USA has multiple third-party TMS systems that are not strongly linked with our ERP, so we had very limited visibility of any type to on-time delivery until the customer notified us of a failure,” he noted. “FourKites has helped us bridge both challenges by creating a single-source system for proactively monitoring shipment health.”

But he also observed that this collaboration marks Ferrero’s first foray into proactive visibility, with the company excited to start exploring the predictive component as the next step.

What’s more, Lawse provided a detailed overview of how Ferrero is currently using FourKites’ offerings.

“We utilize FourKites information to identify the root cause of on-time delivery failures, and to proactively identify loads where we need to update our customers on shipping status, with the goal of reversing performance penalties or avoiding them altogether,” said Lawse. “We will also be using the information in our carrier management processes (both performance and data/usage compliance).  Further out on the horizon are use cases such as Facility Manager for inbound management at our distribution centers, and potentially sharing real-time load information with key customers.”

Ferrero’s Lawse decline to provide metrics of efficiency gains, in the form of things like time- and money-savings, and other efficiency improvements, as the company is only six months into these endeavors.

“We’re delighted to add one of the world's top chocolate and confectionery companies to our constantly growing global network of enterprise food shippers,” said FourKites’ founder and CEO Mathew Elenjickal, in a statement. “We are impressed with Ferrero's clear dedication to customer satisfaction and forward-thinking adoption of supply chain technology, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the FourKites family.”