With five $1 billion brands, Kimberly-Clark’s supply chain is a complex network designed to deliver high-quality products, on-time, to meet their customers’ highly variable demand. Join us as we uncover how Kimberly-Clark used a digital environment where associates and carrier partners could easily interact with each other to manage their site pickup and delivery schedules, while keeping everybody on the same page.
One Supply Chain – One Platform
How Kimberly-Clark slashed time spent on a task by 80% while creating a dynamic environment for associates and carriers to thrive in.
Complex networks require precise coordination, so when issues arise things can quickly become very challenging. From disparate data feeds, competing processes, and unreliable information – teams struggled to find time to focus on value-creating strategy.
Wanting to build a more reliable supply chain for its customers, Kimberly-Clark had to tackle uncertainty across its data and processes, especially at the facility-level where bottlenecks slow product down and add unplanned costs.
And on top of everything else, Kimberly-Clark distribution center associates were swamped with the tedious task of managing facility shipping and receiving schedules, which siphoned valuable time from growth initiatives.
Kimberly-Clark's process was cumbersome, requiring five steps and multiple systems accessed to even book an appointment – and that was before any rescheduling.
They created a digital environment where Kimberly-Clark’s associates and carrier partners could easily interact with each other to manage their site pickup and delivery schedules, while keeping everybody on the same page.
Recognizing that their site shipping and receiving schedules were heavily influenced by network ETAs, Kimberly-Clark worked with their trusted supply chain visibility provider, FourKites, on a solution.
With Appointment Manager, Kimberly-Clark reduced the time spent on booking appointments by 80%, with zero emails and only one system to access across corporate, site and carriers.
To better plan and mitigate the impact of exceptions, Kimberly-Clark surfaces FourKites’ Dynamic ETAs® of inbound trucks to frontline associates to enable a more proactive approach to appointment times in the field.
Knowing current appointment times are important for stakeholders across their entire organization, Kimberly-Clark uses an API to automatically update confirmed and rescheduled appointments within their TMS and ERP.
Appointment Manager even created a more dependable way to manage capacity, allowing them to limit the number of slots booked in a day or reprioritize teams when an ETA was different than expected.
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In their time using Appointment Manager, Kimberly-Clark has been able to save 2,000 hours of work, schedule 15,000 appointments and reduce email traffic by over 60,000 emails.
With a new two-step process, Kimberly-Clark was able to free up time to deliver on their vision of a “Purpose-Driven Supply Chain” which better serves their global customers.
[A purpose-led supply chain] looks like everyone within the supply chain understanding their reason for being the purpose behind what they do every day and how they bring value to the customer. For example, within Kimberly-Clark, our purpose is to deliver Better Care for a Better World.”
Lori Shaffer
Vice President of Global Nonwovens
Together with FourKites, Kimberly-Clark took one of the most complex, disruption-sensitive elements of its business, and created an environment that not only helped reduce cost and service bottlenecks, but enabled their associates to thrive in a fast-paced environment.
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