This company manages an international customs clearance operation inside a major international freight forwarding hub location.

Background

This contract services a $21 billion dollar Supply Chain Company whose primary services include airfreight, ground transportation, e-commerce and international freight forwarding.

The Problem

The primary issue the Client had was not completing the sort of packages and customs documentation, coming into the Hub on international flights within the contracted time frame. The result of this was that the Freight Forwarder was not able to achieve performance guarantees on domestic deliveries made up from the international shipments and the Client was not realizing its performance based incentive.

Scope and Assignment

With the Client and Freight Forwarder Synergetics worked to implement layout, process, and systems improvements in order to insure that the International Sort was completed on time. Taking a cycle time reduction approach we tracked the critical steps of the process from the flight arrival time and throughout the overall process. We found that there was not clear communications between the sort area and flight arrivals, in some cases the shipments would sit on the plane or in off load area for a significant amount of time before being picked up by the sort department. We also found that poor coordination of the customs documentation at the time of sort was a problem. In many cases documentation was either lost or misplaced resulting in expanded processing time. Implementing effective operating procedures and employee routines combined with a revised facility layout emphasizing staging areas and visual management tools resulted in getting the relationship back on track.

The Results

We achieved a 45% cycle time reduction. This performance was maintained and allowed the Client to reestablish a performance based incentive and bring the business into a profitable relationship. Savings during the first year following our implementation exceeded $3.5 million. Additionally Synergetics was attributed to saving this freight forwarding account for our Client.

Synergetics Installations Worldwide, Inc.

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