DC Velocity - October 2016

52 DC VELOCITY OCTOBER 2016 www.dcvelocity.com applications

A look at how DCs are using equipment and services to rev up their operations

You may have never heard of Barry Callebaut Group, but chances are, you’ve tasted its product. Barry Callebaut is a business-to-business chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, with annual sales of $6.6 billion and customers all over the planet. In fact, the Zurich, Switzerland-based company’s reach is so vast it likes to say that its ingredients are found in one out of every five chocolate and cocoa products consumed worldwide.

In the course of supplying chocolate from its 52 facilities to food manufacturers in more than 100 countries, Barry Callebaut realized it needed a better way to manage global shipments. In particular, it was concerned that its outdated manual processes could result in inaccurate bills of lading and delivery-time estimates. That led the company to look for an automated method of tracking the large volumes of containers it ships by ocean.

“We needed a technolo-
gy-based solution to better manage ocean shipments,
carriers, lanes, and leadtimes across the supply chain,” says
Martin Kaeshammer, Barry Callebaut’s team leader for ori-
gin shipping–planning. “We had no live tracking of goods
in transit, estimated time of arrival was calculated based
on transit time as provided by the carriers, and we had no
visibility into the actual perfor-
mance of carriers.”
The company found the
solution to its problem in a
cloud-based transportation
management system (TMS)
from Waterloo, Ontario-based
Descartes Systems Group.
The application is designed to
reduce complexity and trim
users’ logistics spend by better
managing processes throughout
the shipment lifecycle. Barry
Callebaut is now using the new
tool to manage ocean shipments
from its cocoa processing facto-
ries in West Africa.
Controlling that complex
cocoa flow with Descartes’ soft-
ware has given Barry Callebaut
better control over its choco-
late empire. “It’s a large supply
chain network to manage for
sea freight, and the Descartes
solution will allow us to better
manage rates and relationships with carriers and forward-
ers,” Kaeshammer says. “It will also allow us to add more
lanes as business needs dictate.”

Thanks to a cloud-based TMS, this Swiss chocolate wholesaler has gained better visibility over 40-foot containers stuffed with West African cocoa … hungry yet?