US-Latin America supply chain for office equipment maker

Challenge

High supply chain costs and relatively low service to distributors in Latin American markets prompted a major office equipment maker to seek our help:

• Evaluate changing customer requirements.
• Determine best practices by competitors and others serving Latin America.
• Recommend ways to boost supply chain performance.

Approach

• Conduct interviews of manufacturers, distributors and third-party logistics providers.
  • Determine customer expectations by country type.
  • Identify current and future practices of leading technology and consumer goods manufacturers.
  • Develop specific examples of best practices.
• Synthesize learnings from primary and secondary sources.
• Provide compelling report to management.
  • Evolving customer needs.
  • Best practices by competitors and others.
  • Objective view of required performance levels.
  • Fact-based recommendations for priority actions.

Results

• Identified opportunities to reduce supply chain costs by 2 percent of revenue and raise product availability by 15 percentage points.
• Enabled client team to validate hypotheses and prioritize initiatives.
• Obtained senior management buy-in for change program.