Business Driver

After completing a $5 billion acquisition that doubled its market cap and established cost synergies exceeding $100 million/year driven in part by optimization of transportation and distribution systems, our Client began a multi-year effort to operationally reorganize itself as a consolidated legal entity with a single reimplemented instance of SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). To complement the SAP reimplementation team, the CIO asked Trexin to lead the effort to integrate the new instance of SAP with their numerous logistics systems.

Approach

Trexin’s initial focus centered on supporting the SAP implementation and defining the technical architecture for its integration with key logistics systems, starting with rail and truck. As the SAP reimplementation advanced, Trexin’s focus shifted towards facilitating the production rollout, including the custom development of ancillary applications not originally anticipated but essential to operate as an integrated manufacturing, distribution, and logistics supplier of agricultural products across two continents, nine plants, and an extensive network of terminals and warehouses.

While leading the integration of the truck logistics system that was recently upgraded by a 3rd party vendor, it became apparent that the updated system was operationally infeasible. To maintain business continuity and quickly recover, our Client asked us to deploy another team to de-commission the upgraded truck logistics system, roll back to the legacy system, and co-manage the integration of the legacy system to the new SAP instance. Our Client then asked Trexin to architect, design, and roadmap the development and implementation of a completely new truck logistics system to improve efficiency for the plant and distribution centers while simultaneously increasing system stability and performance.

Given Trexin’s steady progress with the rail and truck logistics systems, our Client asked us to expand our scope to lead two more large projects:

1. The design and implementation of a new inventory management system for outsourced distribution centers, providing improved methods to track incoming inventory and outgoing shipments from leased facilities, and
2. The selection, design, and implementation of a new barge logistics system.

Results

Spanning a 3-year period including more than 20 individual projects/extensions and more than 15 Trexin resources, Trexin successfully completed all its tasks, on-time and on-budget. Our Client successfully consolidated its operations onto a single instance of SAP and fully integrated it with specialized logistics and inventory management systems to provide optimized multimodal shipping and logistics services to its customers.