Case Study: Tailor-Made TMS Enablement Solutions For Taylor Farms

Background

Established in 1995 in the Salinas Valley of California, Taylor Farms set out to become North America's favorite maker of salads and healthy fresh foods. Today, it is the world's top producer of fresh-cut produce, providing fruits and vegetables to many of the largest supermarket chains and restaurants in the U.S., including Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Subway, Pizza Hut, Safeway, and Kroger.

The Business Need

With 14 full-time employees, Taylor Logistics Company (TLC) managed the majority of the inbound transportation and transfer order of five U.S. regional processing facilities. Leveraging a unintegrated, highly-manual TMS solution, they sought to optimize operations processes, customer communication, carrier contract management, and overall distribution workflow.

The Challenge

In June 2013, Redwood's first directive was to implement a new TMS solution in order to improve the connection between Taylor and its carriers, reduce paperwork, manage contracted rates and pricing, and communicate tracking updates to customers. Despite the fact that TLC was using a TMS prior to Redwood, its production and distribution operation lacked visibility and reporting, a centralized process, a single data system of record, and the ability to consolidate or pool shipments between divisions. Additionally, it was unable to integrate the existing TMS with the enterprise's ERP. As a result, load planners received emails and faxes from each processing facility, and entered that information into the system manually, resulting in increased costs and missed opportunities to automate, optimize, and consolidate.

The Solution

Redwood knew that in order for TLC to fully optimize its supply chain, centralized processes would need to be implemented. The company implemented a strategy that would both address TLC’s inefficiencies and be executed with minimal effort and time from Taylor’s already overbur-dened IT resources. TLC leadership agreed and worked with Redwood to create a multi-tiered supply chain solution that would ultimately transform Taylor’s way of thinking, operating and ability to compete. Redwood replaced TLC’s outdated TMS with a best-in-class TMS and incepted RedwoodConnect as the platform to integrate with Taylor’s legacy Micro-soft Dynamics AX ERP. The resulting programs established standardized processes across all Taylor regions with little training and minimal change management required.

A lot of companies — our competitors … by week three, they’re (just getting) ready to make a decision. We’re going to make a decision today that will enable us to get our product to market quicker than anyone else.

Ron Guzman - General Manager, Taylor Logistics & Vice President of Supply Chain & Logistics, Taylor Fresh Foods Inc.

The Result

At the time of program delivery, TLC and its customers realized immediate value with regional users, eliminating manual communications through the newly established integration, enhancing contract management capabili-ties, automating tracking and invoicing activities and establishing a readi-ly-accessible single system of record for data, reporting and network-level visibility. Now 10 FTEs (previously 14) manage the inbound transportation activities of all U.S. processing facilities — an FTE reduction of 29%. With fewer FTEs and increased transportation spend (due to rapid growth), freight spend under management (FUM) per FTE increased an estimated 59%. Additionally, delivered cost per pound (CPP) decreased by an estimat-ed $0.02 — a reduction of 9%.

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