Restructuring the whole logistics processes to meet customers’ expectations

Supply Chain - Success Story

Using Process Mining to analyse their logistics operations enabled a multinational automotive group to rethink 75% of their processes and strengthen its client approach.

Context

Automotive customers’ needs and expectations have changed a lot over the past decade. Among other needs, they want the delivery of the vehicle they purchase to be on-time. In a client-oriented market, our client, a French multinational automotive manufacturer, was looking for the possibility to improve its logistics processes, to better answer their clients and their dealers requirements.

The Global Supply chain department has been empowered to coordinate an international process review project. They wished to analyze the vehicles transportation processes, from plant to dealership. They needed not only to downsize the number of late – or incomplete – deliveries, but also understand the causes of those delays and the associated costs.

success story automotive supply chain

Analyzing the logistics processes in real time

The team used Process Intelligence to consolidate the corporate logistics processes and compare them with the real time ones. As a pilot, project team chose 2 plants in 2 different jurisdictions and focused on 3 deviations:

  • Delivery delays “planned” or occurring during the travel path,
  • Travel path deviations,
  • Delivery errors.

After 2 weeks, the Process Intelligence solution was already delivering a multitude of different process variants, showing errors, bottlenecks and other deviations from the corporate processes. In a specific case, the same type for vehicle delivery (from plant A to dealer D) used different logistic processes! Using an agile approach, the client team immediately “zoomed” into the problems appearing in the logistics process execution to:

  • Find out quickly where and why they were occurring, and/or
  • Discuss with local teams to understand the process variants and define if they were to be implemented or corrected.

Correcting deviations and improving corporate Logistics processes

The pilot was 6 weeks-long and allowed sets of adjustments that brought immediate results. Our client discovered that Process Mining was the solution they needed to:

Follow their corporate processes and improve them by visualizing them in real time

Create metrics easy to explain to their teams through the highlight of their logistics weaknesses causes

The planned KPIs were exceeded and opened discussions with global and local teams in order to build an efficient roadmap. The Process Intelligence solution was used during COVID-19 pandemic to help find real-time Logistics solutions, as well as predictive ones.

Key figures

+ 0 %
of process compliance