Success Stories: Molex

The Transportation Management System (TMS) from CTSI brings new levels of efficiency and transparency to a global manufacturer's logistics and import/export operations.

Molex America, part of the world's second largest manufacturer of electronics, electrical and fiber optic interconnection products systems, has been using CTSI's freight bill payment and audit services since 1990.

In 2002, however, the company decided it needed to elevate supply chain visibility and centralize cost controls, and CTSI was able to fill a gap within Molex's existing SAP resource planning system by offering its on-demand TMS modules to meet these needs.

"We decided to make CTSI a partner in managing our supply chain logistics," said Mark Slick, Import/Export Manager, "and the initial challenge was to get control of domestic distribution and negotiate with carriers."

Initially, they implemented a carrier selection module to assist their "lean" transportation department in monitoring their facilities' usage of designated preferred carriers.  "When we installed the system, our compliance rate was less than 50%; and today, we are over 97% compliant," said Jim Kicher, Molex America's Corporate Transportation Manager.

"We can flag shipments not in compliance with our best practices," he added, "and as a result, we have also seen a substantial savings in overall freight costs."

In addition to monitoring the Molex supply chain, Slick and Kicher also use the CTSI system to make their own departmental operations more transparent to the rest of the company.

"We can push out a lot of information to our corporate organization without burying someone with the responsibility for generating reports," Slick said, "and many more people in our group have ready access to current data."

These Molex TMS users have many different job titles:  shipping supervisors, warehouse manager, logistics specialists, finance directors, plant controllers, freight buyers, and even inside sales representatives who use the system for detailed customer reporting.

"We have accountants at all our sites using TMS to generate their reports," Slick said.  "They can drill down to metrics like cost per pound, cost per hundredweight, and now cost per kilo.  This helps people in the field see the peaks and valleys in transportation costs."

"Paperwork Reduced to Almost Nothing"
Cost benefits aside, Slick and Kicher describe more streamlined operations within their own employee teams, especially in managing freight bill payment and audits. Any transaction that falls outside Molex's criteria for rates, address validation, or general ledger cost account coding, among others, is automatically flagged into the electronic freight bill resolution system for review. What was once a paper-dependent, three-week cycle of resolving disputed bills is now resolved immediately online.

"That benefits everybody," Slick said. "People have time to work on more important things than getting buried in paperwork. Now we can focus on our job: managing logistics."

The outlook for Molex's logistics organization delivering on the promise of "bringing people and technology together, worldwide" seems secure enough, according to Kicher, "CTSI has helped us to move light years ahead."