Technology Archives | Page 11 of 15

CargoWise and Metro’s MVT provide unrivalled technological edge

Apr 26, 2023 | Metro, MVT, Technology

Executing highly complex shipping transactions across multiple users, functions, offices, countries, currencies and languages, Cargowise automates workflows, optimises business processes and provides real-time data visibility.

Cargowise is providing more time for Metro to concentrate on the service it delivers and the development of the highest quality solutions for its clients.

Simon George, Metro’s technical solution director talks about Metro’s Cargowise investment and implementation.

“We care about our customers and our people, which is why we invest in technology like Cargowise, that supports the most valuable assets of our company, with tools that help them adapt swiftly to customer needs and make effective decisions immediately.

Metro began implementing Cargowise as our core freight forwarding operations platform two years ago, with large parts of the business successfully transitioning through the lockdown period, with modular learning, devised by our internal training team.

In adopting Cargowise we are enhancing our paperless office environment, with digital processes, business rules and workflows, designed to identify and eradicate errors before anything untoward happens.

Instead of ‘fire-fighting’ operational issues, our people will be free to concentrate on enhancing solutions and identifying opportunities that add more value for our customers.

Real-time visibility, detailed financial reporting and improved data quality provide the freedom to speed up processes and make strategic decisions faster than ever before.

The reporting and broad-based KPI’s that we can track is providing us with the accurate data that supports immediate and agile, customer-focused decisions.

Integrating Cargowise and our MVT supply chain platform increases the volume of data we can share with customers, enhances the way in which they can view and manipulate this information and means that most data feeds are in, or close to, real-time.

Shipment visibility is a core functionality, with real-time tracking monitoring schedules and global mapping of assets, together with our investment in AI for predictive ETAs, that support efficient planning, while avoiding fees and penalties.

Performance tracking is being simplified and means that customers can track our performance alongside carriers and key vendors globally.

In understanding our customers' ambitions and business goals, we can identify opportunities to cut costs and make improvement in their supply chain, with our innovative Cargowise/MVT technology providing total control and visibility.”

The Metro board continues to invest in internally developed and externally acquired innovation in 2023-2024, which promises to be an exciting and rewarding period for the business and our customers. EMAIL Simon George, Technical Solutions Director, to learn more.

Award recognition for CuDoS customs platform

Mar 29, 2023 | Customs, MVT, Technology

We are delighted to win Gold at the ‘Stevie' Sales and Customer Service Awards 2023, with our key technology partner, WNS, for their ground-breaking contribution to our CuDoS customs platform, in digitising customs declarations, enhancing customer experience and ensuring a smooth transition into the post-Brexit environment.

For over twenty years Metro has been investing in technology, software developers, system analysts and data scientists that have conceived, designed, created and supported four generations of our supply chain management and visibility platform MVT.

MVT is multi-award winning technology that connects shippers to their entire supply chain; providing real-time visibility, milestone event management, control and intelligence, in a secure cloud based environment.

The platform embraces new and emerging technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support existing core and new modular functionalities, like our ECO and Customs (CuDoS) solutions, with the latter recently winning a prestigious award for a key-partner, WNS.

WNS is a leading Business Process Management (BPM) provider that combine technology, analytics and process expertise to co-create innovative, digitally led solutions.

For Metro’s CuDoS solution this meant the automation of cognitive data extraction and contextualisation, using the latest AI/ML and automation capabilities to overhaul and optimise the data capture and customs declaration processes.

The ‘Stevie Awards’ are the world's premier business awards, honouring and generating public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions that organisations make. WNS have won the customer service category for the work they have done with Metro, to accelerate CuDoS’ customer experience through hybrid learning in reduced dependency on multiple systems for data extraction and verification.

With WNS’ digitisation support, Metro’s CuDoS solution is now achieving a SLA of 98% on turnaround times (customer submission/request through to document delivery) of under two hours.

Other CuDoS performance statistics are just as compelling:

- 20% reduction in headline costs, with 25% increase in volumes

- 96% of declarations processed and submitted to HMRC within 30 minutes of documents receipt

- 99% processing accuracy

- ML/AI contributed to record turnaround speeds under 8 mins

Metro are at the forefront of automated customs brokerage solutions, with our CuDoS declaration platform and dedicated team of customs experts, reacting swiftly to changes in the UK’s trading regime with the EU and rest of world.

To learn how we can simplify and automate customs declarations for your businesses, please EMAIL Elliot Carlile to review the options.

Metro continues to invest in MVT and CuDoS innovation in 2023-2024, which promises to be an exciting period for the business. EMAIL Simon George, Technical Solutions Director, to learn more.

Supply chains returning to just-in-time focus

Mar 29, 2023 | MVT, Supply Chain, Technology

The Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply’s (CIPS) Procurement Futures conference brought together the most influential procurement professionals to figure out how to make supply chains more resilient, as buyers consider returning to just-in-time strategies, as port congestion eases.

The disruption of the past two years shifted supply chain operations to’ just-in-case’ (JIC) procurement strategies, but this focus is changing as port congestion and supply chain disruption has cleared and buying teams now consider how to deal with inventory levels.

Speaking at the conference, the CIPS chief economist confirmed that supply chains are increasingly moving back to ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) from ‘just-in-case’, but with significant overstocking in the UK, Europe and North America, many distribution centre's are full.

In the worst case, merchants still hold inventory across their supply chain, with stocks at ports, or 3rd party storage facilities, although CIPS expect those stocks will work through the system by quarter one, or quarter two, after which supply chains will be fluid again.

With China opening up, the manufacturing capability for ‘just in time’ is returning but, while COVID19 turbulence and uncertainty has diminished, climate-related disruptions, tensions between the United States and China, and the war between Russia and Ukraine raise another question mark over how buyers might manage risk.

These disruptions are tempting some to still maintain lots of inventory, to ensure business continuity, but that would be a mistake, as JIT remains the most efficient system. With interest rates rising, returning to JIC and adding inventory, harms performance and raises costs without necessarily improving resilience.

For businesses struggling with excess inventory and overstocked warehouses, the lean JIT operating model makes sense, and on many key routes and modes the concept of ordering inventory to arrive ‘just in time’ is viable again.

The supply chain is a system of deadlines, actions, processes and participants and no one can control the end-to-end supply chain, without visibility and the means to manage those four critical elements.

Instead of living on hope, traders can use our supply chain management platform, MVT, to remove supply chain risk, by evaluating their supply chain and determining where to locate and manage strategic capacity and inventory, to support changing demand patterns.

In challenging economic conditions, smart executives use MVT to manage their supply chain effectively and tighten their control over inventory in their supply chain, while adapting their supplier footprint to meet customer conditions.

MVT helps companies offshore, reshore or nearshore their vendors and production, by expanding procurement control and adapting supply chains to match the future.

Metro’s MVT supply chain platform reduces the cost, time and risk of re-sourcing to new vendors and locations, with PO management, visibility and communication tools that onboard and integrate new suppliers into the supply chain.

To learn more or to arrange a demo EMAIL Elliot Carlile.

Metro continues its digital transformation journey

Mar 15, 2023 | MVT, Technology

While the freight and logistics sector may be accused of lagging other industries, in developing its digital capability, Metro continues to develop service capability that goes beyond offering just supply-chain visibility.

The investments we’ve made in systems and cloud networks create real-time dashboards that show shippers what’s happening in their supply chain network, with rich data that can be adapted and interrogated to show which supply chain lever to pull next.

Our immediate objective is getting more and more data digitised, to provide shippers with visualisation of their data, so they can analyse it and we can automate more operations, so that people can focus on adding value to the process.

Control, creativity, bespoke solutions and customer dialogue are at the core of our digital evolution and developments. We are investing heavily to ensure that we remain at the cutting edge of the industry and deliver beyond your expectations across all areas and functions within the business. It is relentless and an area that Metro are passionate about to ensure that we have a solid platform that performs for the next decade and beyond.

Metro’s new operations platform, which is powered by CargoWise, has been implemented in our customs brokerage and airfreight areas as well as our Elite brand, all of which are benefiting from workflow automation, which reduce errors and improve efficiencies.

Implementation will continue throughout the summer of 2023, when sea imports and export customer services will transition, followed by customer specific teams to complete the rollout by October. This has been part of a 30 month journey which now has the end in sight, although it will not finish once the current destination is reached. Digital solutions and design never stand still.

Customers may see some slightly different documentation being produced as we migrate and they will be able to access our new track and trace application, with a notification engine, the DC Manager app, and more due to appear soon.

Conceived, created and supported by our internal technical solutions team, Metro’s bespoke supply chain management platform, MVT, is moving to version 4, to leverage the additional end-to-end visibility of shipments the CargoWise product provides and add more capability to our ECO product.

Thanks to our business process solutions teams in the UK and India, no process has been left behind, as we strive for simplification and automation.

These significant developments in digitisation, processes and data transparency is optimising our operations and commercial functions, which means they can become even more customer focused and available to serve.

The pandemic demonstrated the critical importance of effective supply chain visibility and digitising supply-chain operations, to understand what was happening, maintain control and initiate change.

We already embrace real-time carrier inputs and geo-fencing in enhancing data integrity and supply chain visibility, and look forward to adding more functionality as carriers add sensors to their container fleets, and AI interprets a rapidly changing environment.

We have many initiatives that have been and are being rolled out to our customers, and new concepts in design stage so there is much much more to come.

The Metro board continues to invest in internally developed and externally acquired innovation in 2023-2024, which promises to be an exciting period for the Technical Solutions Team and business as a whole. EMAIL Simon George, Technical Solutions Director, to learn more.