How Cargill is Innovating With Real-Time Visibility

The Challenge

Cargill, one of the world’s largest providers of food, agriculture, and industrial products has a deep commitment to customer service and innovation. Cargill was looking for a transportation supply chain execution solution that would provide accurate visibility across its wide-ranging carrier base. After a thorough vetting process to ensure that the solution could meet Cargill’s stringent requirements for enterprise-grade security, scalability, and mobile capabilities, Cargill selected FourKites as their transportation visibility platform.

FourKites Solution

FourKites rolled out its solution for Cargill in two phases, first collaborating with Cargill Global IT to integrate FourKites’ software with the SAP TM used by many of Cargill’s non-perishable businesses. During Phase One, FourKites integrated with Cargill’s highest-volume carriers and implemented single sign-on across Cargill’s user base, allowing company personnel to log in securely and begin tracking loads right away. For Phase Two, which will begin soon, FourKites will integrate with the BluJay TMS to track loads across the Cargill Protein Business.

“Outstanding customer service has been a major benefit of using the FourKites platform. We’re not getting an upset customer calling Cargill asking, ‘Why hasn’t my truck arrived yet?’ Instead, with the click of a button, we can instantly get a status report of all truck shipments. If we see a shipment is running late, and we can proactively contact the customer or the delivery site and give them an update.”

Jackie Bailey, Cargill Transportation and Logistics, North America Regional Lead

Benefits and What’s Next?

“One of the most exciting parts of the project was how fast we were able to get the tool up and running,” said Jeannie Frana, Global Process Manager at Cargill. “We were actively tracking shipments with our first set of carriers in just a couple of weeks. The tool not only gives us visibility to our shipments, but will also provide us data that we will be able to further analyze. We should be able to find trends on items like on-time delivery, adherence to appointment times or even non-carrier issues at pick-up or delivery.”

Having real-time truck status information allows Cargill to focus only on at-risk loads (exceptions) rather than having to review each load, saving time and reducing hassles for both Cargill and their carriers. Presently months ahead of Cargill’s target completion date, FourKites is successfully tracking more than 70% of Cargill’s targeted load volume, and that percentage grows every day. Cargill’s transportation analysts and sourcing teams now access FourKites’ web app daily, and utilize features such as email notifications and user messages to communicate across the organization. Cargill plans to extend usage of FourKites data beyond the Truck, Operations, Transportation and Logistics teams, to include Customer Service teams, who can use the data to develop strategies for more effectively serving customers.