Faurecia Seating is the world’s leading component manufacturer of automotive seating and complete seat design and assembly for many global brands, e.g. Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes. The company is highly regarded as an innovative producer of a wide range of seat products, including seat covers, accessories and foams, seat electronics, and advanced mechatronic systems. With 74 production sites in 23 countries, the sheer scale of Faurecia’s operations and the nature of their business presents quite a few challenges for the company’s supply chain operations.
Credit: Faurecia
Credit: Faurecia
High stakes for Just in Time deliveries
Faurecia’s customers require consistent and reliable deliveries of seat parts to sustain their Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing processes. The nature of Faurecia’s operations means its supply chain is highly complex and faces three key challenges. Firstly, unexpected waiting times or additional distances travelled by carriers resulted in additional carrier costs. Secondly, the costs of production line stops when a component’s supply was disrupted were very high. Thirdly, such disruptions incur high penalties for unforeseen late deliveries. By overcoming these challenges, Faurecia wanted to significantly improve both customer satisfaction and profitability levels.
First real-time tracking of land transport in the automotive industry
So how can a company such as Faurecia limit supply chain risk and gain a competitive advantage? The company selected Shippeo, a global leader and European specialist in real-time transportation visibility, to provide Faurecia, its carriers and its customers with instant access to predictive and real-time visibility of all deliveries. Shippeo’s solution relies on advanced technologies and integrations with existing systems and tools, delivered in a simple and intuitive way.
Faurecia and Shippeo are now operating the first real-time tracking system for land transportation in the automotive industry. The system is based on a network of over 140,000 carriers and an innovative, machine learning Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) calculation, specifically designed for the unique constraints of road transport. Successfully deployed in all European plants by Faurecia’s supply chain operations department in Poland, Shippeo’s platform is directly integrated with Faurecia’s existing systems and tracks all European flows, regardless of region (Shippeo has a presence in 24 European countries) or language (Shippeo’s customer support team has speakers of more than 25 languages on board). Shippeo directly integrates with all 180 carriers using more than 40 tailored API connections and tracking 17,000 orders per month. Over 40 users across the supply chain use the platform every day. The portal is accessed approximately 1000 times per week.
But the real-time transportation visibility platform doesn’t just create value for Faurecia. It also creates value for their customers and partners. It improves customer satisfaction by better managing each party’s expectations and creating resilience. In addition to improving overall efficiency across the supply chain the real-time communications, sent automatically, allow Faurecia’s customer support teams to take proactive measures swiftly and reduce any transportation risks.
Avoiding line stops and penalties
Real-time transportation visibility has become a direct source of cost optimisation for Faurecia. By tracking dwell times and anticipating delays, the company can better avoid line stops and penalties. The platform has also proven to be a useful resource optimiser, enabling refined tracking of any transportation inefficiencies, and providing the data needed to create optimal milk-runs.
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