Suntory Global Spirits achieved a 99% reduction in demurrage fees and improved overall supply chain performance within six months through real-time visibility provided by project44.
About Suntory
Established in 1795, Suntory Global Spirits, distributes its popular spirits, including Jim Beam®, Maker’s Mark, and many others, across 69 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new challenges that highlighted the need for an adaptive, data-driven approach managing their complex supply chain.
Challenge
Through the pandemic, Suntory’s global logistics costs had escalated from 6% to 25% of goods cost, driven by:
- Stockouts triggered by static lead times that failed to account for global supply chain disruptions
- Excess costs from detention and demurrage fees, compounded by frequent air freight expedites
- Operational inefficiencies created by siloed data, over-reliance on manual processes, and the complexity of managing thousands of SKUs
These challenges led Suntory Global Spirits to seek technology solutions that would help them eliminate data silos, reduce excess costs, and streamline processes and decision-making, especially amidst disruption.
Solution
Suntory Global Spirits established a control tower to centralize operations from demand planning to financials and partnered with project44 for enhanced in-transit inventory visibility. project44 provided:
- Multimodal shipment visibility (ocean, air, rail, FTL, LTL) connected to orders with SKU-level granularity for managing in-transit inventory
- Predictive end-to-end ETAs
- Insights on historical carrier performance
- Timely data on shipments and inventory at risk due to global supply chain disruptions
- Information on containers incurring—or at risk of incurring—detention and demurrage charges
- Customizable data filters, exceptions, and alerts
project44 is telling a story of the state of the industry. We can now react so much faster on corrective actions.
Hans Moorlag
Senior Manager of Global Logistics
成果
Suntory Global Spirits went live with project44 in October 2023 and began seeing results in less than six months, including:
01
Cost control: Achieved a 99% reduction in demurrage costs by leveraging timely data on containers at risk, enabling them to preemptively move containers before incurring fees.
02
Elimination of costly data silos: Integrated seamlessly with Suntory’s control tower, providing a single source of truth for all shipments moved by any carrier or forwarder with end-to-end order visibility at the SKO/PO/SO level.
03
Improved customer experience: Actionable insights can be shared directly with customers, leading to higher satisfaction through cost reduction and avoidance.
04
Carrier network optimization: Developed custom KPIs to evaluate carrier and freight forwarder performance, improving discussions on transit times, roll bookings, and dwell times.
05
Enhanced decision-making velocity: Utilized predictive, multimodal ETAs and project44 insights to shift from reactive to proactive during disruptions including port labor strikes, natural disasters, and geopolitical conflicts that impacted the global supply chain.
We bought this system for the business. This is not for a specific department. This is not just for people in the logistics department. This is a tool for the business, and that’s how we want to use it.
Hans Moorlag
Senior Manager of Global Logistics
