Upply: How does DIAGMA integrate UPPLY solutions?
L.B.: We are regularly called to review and optimize our customers' logistics networks and to do this, model them. These models are fed by our own data, but also by those of our customers (transportation prices, historical costs, etc.). We use the Compare & Analyze solution developed by UPPLY to obtain cost data on “exotic” destinations, on new routes for our customers, particularly those by sea and by air. This allows us to save time and obtain qualitative data in a few minutes (vs. requesting rates from multiple carriers, which can take several days). By these means, we consolidate our transportation data and are able to offer more reliable models to our customers.
Upply: Do you have any concrete examples of your use of UPPLY to give us?
L.B.: For a luxury goods manufacturer, we needed to make an air transportation cost study from various airports such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan to several non-European airports. Likewise, for a textile distributor, we validated our hypotheses on the differences in land transportation costs for inbound and outbound journeys between France and Spain. For a sporting goods distributor whose global distribution plan we are reviewing, we have been able to include the costs on our client's hitherto unexploited routes via UPPLY. Sometimes, certain prices in the UPPLY database cover a fairly large geographical area, such as maritime rates to countries like Congo or Senegal, or to South America, when in reality prices are different for each port. This is why UPPLY publishes a confidence index (A, B, C, D, E) which makes it possible to adapt and qualify the robustness of the analyses. In summary, we are very satisfied with the UPPLY platform. It allows us to make our data models even more efficient, and to perform sensitivity analyses more easily across various scenarios, to the greater satisfaction of our customers.
Photo: Léandre Boulez, Associate at DIAGMA