Customized Distribution Services Achieves Best In Class Speed and Service With Veryable

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"Veryable gave the operation more flexibility and has allowed us to be able to react to demand more efficiently"

-Christopher Couture, GM, Customized Distribution Services

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Setting the Stage

Flashback to early 2022, the country and the world are coming out of the pandemic and feeling the effects of the supply chain crisis. As a result, facilities across the industry had to adapt to a new set of challenges and some challenges they had been familiar with. Customized Distribution Services is a 3PL provider for Henkel and several other well-known clients across the country.

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In February of 2022, the Edwardsville facility GM Chris Couture met with the Veryable team to address some of these issues. Overall, the facility was dealing with high overtime usage, reliance on temp and staffing agency labor, and a significant backlog of over 100 trailers in their yard that they struggled to get through. Their ability to adapt to the challenges they were facing was inhibited by the rapidly changing labor market and the instability in the supply chain.

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Solutions

The Edwardsville 3PL began posting ops to address the backlog constraint with the hundred-plus trailers. Within just a couple of days, the Veryable operators had addressed and alleviated this issue, and the team began to move into other functions in the facility.

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After developing a solid base of procedure and rhythm with the Veryable platform, the CDS team began posting weekend ops, and soon after that, the team started moving into the nights as well. By May, CDS had assembled a “bench” of roughly 50 operators that had come through the facility, been trained, and could flex in and out of their facility as needed.

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The month of June saw considerable growth for the Veryable resource with CDS. Demand spiked as the end of Q2 neared; the facility, between day and night, went from needing 15 per day to meet the need to over 40. The following month and a half showed massive growth, with the labor pool soaring to over 100 in the next three months. Operation Managers shared with the Veryable team that without this resource, they wouldn’t have been able to stay up to speed with the increased demand.

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One of the premier advantages of the Veryable resource is the ability to have a tool that allows you to scale down when needed. Since the month of August, demand at the facility has gone down. Using the Veryable tool has enabled the facility and its management to scale down at a moment’s notice with zero cost. Since incorporating Veryable within the operation, to date, 29,668 hours of labor have been gained by CDS.

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Creating Value

Creating Efficiency with Inbound Delivery

One of the key issues at the beginning with usage with Veryable was the inability to keep up speed and efficiency with delivering inbound trailers on time. Initially, the rate of Inbound trailers received on time was roughly 44.3%. Compared to a goal of 99.5%, the rate at which trailers were being received and unloaded slowed down the facility. Now the rate is sitting at 80%, which shows a 35.7% increase in speed over the last seven months of using Veryable in the facility.

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"Dwell Time" in Facility Yard

“As discussed, one of the core issues impacting CDS’ success was their constant issue with compounding backlog due to high dwell times for drivers bringing in trailers to the facility.

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When beginning to work with Veryable, there was an average of over 62 times a week when drivers had to wait more than two hours or more to unload their trailers. That rate of speed was also an area of concern that the Veryable team partnered with CDS to tackle. As a result, the Dwell Time is now in the mid-40s, allowing the facility to adapt and process product faster.

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