Innovation through an age: Infor and DB Schenker

Diving deeper: The technology behind innovation

Infor digital solutions support two main central offerings within DB Schenker: the APAC Contract Logistics product and the Intercontinental Supply Chain Solutions (ISC) product.

The ISC portfolio includes a wide range of products to help air and ocean customers optimize global supply chains. Infor technology has been deployed in two main ways to address this issue. First, by using the enhanced planning and supply chain collaboration of Infor Nexus, ISC accelerates supply chain performance by improving visibility and driving efficiency. This results in better cash-to-cash cycles.

Elsewhere, Infor Nexus enables ISC to offer value-added services such as PO management, origin management, and buyers consolidation. These solutions allow DB Schenker to differentiate itself as an elite logistics service provider.

To enable true digital supply chain collaboration, both approaches demand that the ISC business can connect to a full network platform where customers, suppliers, carriers, and thousands of users can access an absolute version of the truth and manage processes end to end. DB Schenker has achieved this goal at an impressive scale. The company manages several hundred thousand shipments on the platform and processes more than a million purchase orders.

The warehouse dimension

Infor WMS was originally implemented as part of a strategy to consolidate a scattered WMS system landscape that had multiple platforms on different, heavily modified releases. This program quickly helped to reduce total cost of ownership and improved the speed of innovation. The DB Schenker WMS transformation project is now live in 11 countries, spanning more than 200 users and serving more than 100 global customers.

Within this new strategy, DB Schenker defined a clear target picture of focused investments including both Infor WMS and Infor CloudSuite Industrial (CSI). Now, for the Contract Logistics division within DBS, these applications are implemented on a customer project by customer project basis.

Infor CloudSuite Industrial is the basis for the Schenker material requirements planning (MRP) solution offering that is provided to the most sophisticated customers. For example, for one strategic customer in the telecommunications space, DB Schenker provides value added services (globally), including light manufacturing operations. Elsewhere, Infor CloudSuite Industrial underpins DB Schenker’s MRP services. The application helps to extend Infor WMS with capabilities that include forecasting, MRP, advanced planning and scheduling, purchase management, inventory management, and production-assembly management.

This harmonized platform features standardized, high functionality capabilities that are available throughout all geographies. It has been refined from DB Schenker by co-development with Infor for faster innovation and reduced costs.

As an example, Infor WMS is at the heart of DB Schenker’s new state-of-the-art Red Lion warehouse in Singapore, synchronizing the facility’s automations and operational workflows.

With this increased agility and velocity, Schenker is better equipped to meet high order volumes and complex customer demands in a dynamic and rapidly evolving market.

Innovating for tomorrow with predictive ETAs

Schenker is paving its way towards a fully digital, next gen supply chain network using the Infor Nexus commerce network. The solution has not only enabled DB Schenker to gain greater visibility across its supply chain, but also led to the development of predictive estimated time of arrival (ETA) notifications.

In fact, as the first major logistics service provider (LSP) to invest in Infor Nexus Control Center, DB Schenker has already reported better predictive ETA accuracy compared to carriers using IoT. Trials amongst early-adopter customers have reported industryleading levels of reliability when predicting the date of final goods arrival, from the point of the original purchase order being raised.

Joachim Schaut, vice-president, Global ISC at DB Schenker explains: “As a major LSP we recognize that we can drive huge innovation into the industry, and we are committed to a position of digital leadership. We now have an unprecedented window into processes that make up the complete end-to-end journey for global logistics customers and can offer reliable intelligence for the arrival of goods. As an early adopter, DBS is compiling and integrating a huge array of live visibility data.”

The benefits of partnership

The partnership with Infor has seen a range of clear, tangible business benefits. Current customer retention figures for DB Schenker ISC are significantly above average and the rapid implementation templates have reduced customer onboarding dramatically.

Within the Red Lion facility, Infor WMS has already proven to increase the company’s warehouse productivity by up to 100% compared to manual processes, and has effectively reduced the lead time for customers by 40% compared to non-integrated facilities.

Enter COVID

Given the size and scope of DB Schenker’s operations, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been both profound and nuanced. Firstly, there was the challenge of shifting to new patterns of working with almost thousands of employees working from home.

Then substantial differences in the needs of various clients arose. In the fashion apparel industry, footwear companies faced a complete decline in demand, while essential consumer goods saw record peaks in shipping volumes.

Speed was vital for addressing these shifts. Infor Nexus’s capability for delivering visibility down to the SKU and purchase order level was critical and enabled DB Schenker’s customers to both save money and be agile as conditions change.

Within DB Schenker, the improved user interface has decreased training costs and led to a better experience, while externally facing, the customer self service capabilities have improved origin and destination operation efficiencies and provided faster conflict resolution.

Schaut concludes: “Developing a truly connected supply chain on this scale demands world-class innovation and a relentless commitment to improved customer service. As a partner in our quest to deliver on this mission, Infor has been invaluable, and we look forward to further disrupting the global supply chain and logistics industry.”