Floating toys across
the ocean
Situation
A top retail client of HAVI Global Solutions dispenses millions of toys annually as promotional premiums with purchase. We coordinated the shipment of the toys via the Pacific Ocean, from their points of manufacture in Asia to retailers in the United States. At a given time, 2 or 3 promotions and 20-25 toy designs were in use. The massive scale of the program required multiple manufacturers, ports of origin and destination, carrier companies, and container sizes – literally trillions of potential combinations.
HAVI Global Solutions Strategy
- Implemented an automated shipment optimization tool to replace the previous manual, Excel-based process
- Formulated a mixed-integer mathematical modeling problem
- Applied embedded business heuristics to reach an optimal solution
- Created user-friendly reporting tools on solutions
Results
- Provided the client with ongoing visibility of toy movement throughout the shipment process
- Brought added efficiency to the shipping process by maximizing the number of inbound shipments moving through the lower East Coast freight lanes
- Significantly reduced our client’s annual freight costs
Freight & logistics>
