DC Velocity - September 2019

T ec h n o l og y

T RAN S PO R TA TION MANA GE M EN T SY S TE M S

West Coast markets, to coordinating upward of 20 shipments a day for delivery nationwide.

Company leaders quickly realized that their distribution infrastructure wasn’t up to snuff and that handling logistics processes manually was too much of a burden for the small but fast-growing business. The firm’s on-time and must-arrive-by-date (MABD) performance rates were low, keeping it from meeting the stringent demands of many major retailers. Managing its logistics challenges was distracting the company from its main focus: making cookies.

THE SOLUTION: NEW SOFTWARE AND A PROCESS OVERHAUL

Riverview, Fla.-based BlueGrace entered the picture around
2016, first implementing its standalone transportation
management platform, BlueShip, which provided Lenny
& Larry’s employees with a more streamlined system for
booking shipments. The partnership grew from there, as
BlueGrace uncovered deeper problems that were keeping
the manufacturer from meeting some of its production
and delivery goals. As BlueGrace Regional Vice President
Christopher Kupillas explains, Lenny & Larry’s needed to
get a better handle on the data in its IT (information tech-
nology) system as a way to provide a fuller picture and more
forward-looking view of orders and delivery requirements.

That is to say, the firm needed to do more than just automate the shipping process in order to keep up with its growth.

“A lot of the things they did as a
smaller business, moving two to three
shipments a day, just wouldn’t work
anymore,” Kupillas says. “When you
start moving 20, 30, 40 shipments a
day, you have to do some things to
adjust to that.”
BlueGrace took on a larger role
by automating its client’s entire logistics function. The
3PL started by eliminating cumbersome paperwork and
introducing best practices and continuous-improvement
processes for transportation and logistics. Its team of
logistics experts drilled down to the on-time performance
rates of specific customer locations and compared them
with carrier-performance ratings to create an optimal
carrier mix. They then developed new ship-date logic that
matched the Lenny & Larry’s production schedule, helping

HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?

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