The Tranzonic Companies, with a history dating back nearly a century, provide a wide range of essential products in the cleaning, maintenance, absorbents and personal protection sectors. Over the past decade, Tranzonic has experienced consistent, organic growth, in addition to acquiring a significant number of companies.

Challenge

In the wake of considerable growth and an expanding logistics footprint, Tranzonic faced the critical task of managing complex freight audit and payment processes across their truckload (TL) and less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments, which constituted tens of thousands of annual shipments. Additionally, with a high volume of parcel shipments, Tranzonic required expertise in parcel auditing and optimization to streamline their processes and enhance operational efficiency.

In 2020, Tranzonic turned to Transportation Insight (TI) to address these challenges, engaging their services for freight audit support and leveraging their insights for carrier contract management and deployment of the Insight TMS for spot shipments in collaboration with TI's sister organization, Nolan Transportation Group.

Evolution & Acquisition

Tranzonic has had a significant number of acquisitions since partnering with TI. After Tranzonic acquired one company, TI was able to create a scalable process to bring new businesses into the fold. By creating a standard process within Insight TMS, new acquisitions are added as locations into the TMS, and their current contracts are assessed by the TI team to determine opportunities for consolidation.

On the parcel side, TI’s parcel consultants will review the parcel contracts for the acquired company to determine if the contract should be consolidated into the overarching Tranzonic parcel contract.

Results

The partnership with TI streamlined Tranzonic's growth trajectory by:

• Creating a unified system for incoming acquisitions.
• Reducing the complexity of managing freight bills and enhancing data visibility with Beon Insight.
• Facilitating a smooth transition to a new ERP system, leveraging TI’s seamless integration with D365.
• Establishing continuous engagement through regular weekly and quarterly meetings for performance updates and identification of improvement opportunities.

The Tranzonic Companies benefitted from economies of scale in shipping contracts, seamless onboarding of new acquisitions, and real-time data assimilation and analysis – all factors that have positioned transportation as a driver of growth, not a constraint.

Conclusion

Tranzonic's strategic partnership with Transportation Insight has provided a foundation for unparalleled growth and efficient management of their expanding logistical operations. Transportation is steered away from being a potential bottleneck, marking the success of this partnership by allowing Tranzonic to focus on scalability and fortifying their market position.

The emphasis on technology, audit precision and continuous improvement denotes an adaptive approach to logistics that mirrors Tranzonic's ambition to be a leading entity in their industry.

Milbank Manufacturing, a leading player in the energy industry for almost a century, focuses on delivering top-notch metering equipment and enclosures while maintaining exceptional customer service standards.

Milbank collaborates with the Transportation Insight (TI) team for multimodal solutions across truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL) and parcel shipping to streamline shipping and support their ongoing growth.

Challenge

With a vast network including three US based manufacturing facilities, several regional warehouses and over 4,000 distributors, Milbank needed a specialized, collaborative solution to optimize their existing inbound and outbound shipments. Milbank was also looking for opportunities to make their operations more efficient and reduce cost to serve.

Solution

Since 2015, TI has equipped Milbank with cutting-edge technology, data analysis, and insights to optimize LTL carriers and lanes, pursue personalized analysis, and negotiate favorable contracts with carriers. For truckload shipments, TI assists with annual bids for their truckload volume, understanding potential opportunities for various lanes. Due to their significant less-than-truckload (LTL) volume, they use a wide variety of LTL carriers.

Utilizing Beon Insight, TI’s data visualization tool, TI combined with the Milbank team have been able to pinpoint LTL optimization opportunities, identifying cost-saving areas within the Milbank network while maintaining service excellence for end customers.

Collaborating closely with the Milbank operations team, TI streamlined transportation planning and optimization through a dedicated operations planner for LTL and truckload shipments. This partnership has boosted efficiency and reduced cost-to-serve metrics for distribution partners and third-party sites.

For Milbank’s parcel shipments, TI offers small parcel consulting support to optimize carrier mix and identify growth opportunities aligned with Milbank’s long-term objectives. Freight and parcel audit services by TI facilitate streamlined invoicing and error recovery, ensuring operational efficiency.

Lastly, with seamless integration into TI’s technology, Milbank gains comprehensive visibility across their supply chain. From carrier procurement to invoice consolidation, TI is committed to partnering with Milbank to help deliver on their promise of excellence to their end-users.

Results

• 40K+ loads moved annually through Insight TMS across LTL and TL.
• Weekly consolidation of 750+ freight invoices into a single invoice streamlines financial processes.
• Annually, six-figure cost savings generated using TI’s truckload bid board within Insight TMS.
• Average annual savings of over $90,000 through error correction cost avoidance with TI’s invoice auditing services.

“We are proud to partner with Transportation Insight to optimize our supply chain and streamline our shipping processes. Through collaborative efforts, we have achieved significant cost savings and improved efficiency across our operations, enhancing our ability to deliver exceptional service to our customers.” – Doug Ubel, Vice President of Supply Chain

“Transportation Insight provides more than a service, they are a trusted strategic partner that works extremely hard to identify areas of cost savings in all aspects of your logistics modes and processes.”  – Matthew Gragg, Senior Manager Warehousing and Logistics