Logistics

Logistics Service Providers (LSP's) typically operate in a highly competitive, low-margin industry where the provision of additional value-added services to clients provides the opportunity for higher profitability and long term sustainability. LSP’s need to rapidly convince their customers of their capabilities to deliver a cost-effective and efficient service while adding value to their business through additional innovative services and solutions. A focus on continuous process improvement using strategic modelling and logistics design can help LSP’s establish these long-term client relationships. On the other hand, LSP’s are under constant pressure to contain their costs while meeting the contractual service levels and customer expectations of service delivery.

BMA has worked with several leading global and local LSP’s providing solutions and services that address the following key areas:

• WIN NEW BUSINESS by supporting their pricing models with scientific evidence derived from the living network models, by impressing their prospects with smart solutions that visibly add value in a cost-effective manner, and by having the capability to offer additional value-add services (such as scenario analysis on import and/or distribution strategies, optimal location of facilities, inventory optimisation).
• RETAIN CUSTOMERS by offering additional, high-margin, value-add services such as providing visualisation of their network (“a picture is worth a thousand words”), scenario analysis to evaluate more effective import and/or distribution analysis, inventory management and/or optimisation as well as identifying potential cost saving opportunities on the client’s network.
• OWN NETWORK ANALYSIS by quantifying the impact of winning or losing a major client on their shared network, network visualisation across clients, industries and geographies, analyse opportunities to consolidate and/or optimise their own networks.
• CONTRACT MANAGEMENT: as most LSP's commit to long term contracts, a major pain point is the management and optimisation of margins over the entire period of the contract lifecycle. BMA has designed a contracts decision-support solution which covers the entire contract lifecycle. The solution is based on a model centred on initial contract costing, and it includes all the assumptions and constraints related to a client’s business. It is a forward-looking solution that ties activities directly to the economic consequences through constraint-based modelling. The solution directly addresses the change in contract terms that accompany a multi-year service contract. As demand and flow patterns are updated periodically, the solution will optimise resource requirements to total minimum costs and provide accurate financial comparison of Baseline to Budget to Actuals at a detailed level.