London, 20th January 2012 – Supply chain solutions provider SBS Worldwide has scooped a prestigious BIFA freighting award for the second year running.
SBS Worldwide and sister company Virtualized Logistics are delighted to announce that they were yesterday named winners of the Supply Chain Management Award at the BIFA Freight Service Awards.
The win follows on from last year, when SBS won BIFA’s Ocean Freight Award for its ship fewer containers project.
The two companies scooped the award for their work on improving the supply chain of publisher Wolters Kluwer.
SBS and VL helped the publisher to reduce the costs of its supply chain by $400,000 per annum by adapting their eDC software to give Wolters Kluwer – and now the rest of the publishing industry – the visibility it needs to ship books direct from China.
In the past, books were transported from China into central warehouses in the US before being shipped back out around the world.
SBS Worldwide and VL developed bespoke software and designed and manage a complete transport operation that enables Wolters Kluwer take control of costs – and of the books themselves.
The solution gives everyone who needs it – production, accounts and sales teams – access to the information about where the books are and when delivery can be expected, right from the pre-production stage.
This not only reduces transport costs, it also cuts delivery times by weeks and gives more flexibility to redirect books to areas of highest demand.
In addition to hard savings of both time and money, Wolters Kluwer sees significant value in the new suite of management reports that flow from eDC.
It can look at the relative percentage of times that its printers are hitting their dates. But more importantly, it also has the detail to know what’s causing the delay.
Presenting the title, Christopher Hewitt from award sponsor BoxTop Technologies described SBS as “a deserved winner that had created a true vendor relationship”.
He said: “SBS and VL have created an innovative solution to manage the supply chain of a large publishing customer more cost-effectively, by consolidating millions of Asian-printed books a year for a major US publisher, and drastically reducing their costs while improving service levels.”
SBS Worldwide UK Managing Director Philip Brown, who collected the award on behalf of the team at the ceremony in central London yesterday, says the award was a testament to true partnership and shows the benefits of a consultative approach.
“We worked closely with Wolters Kluwer to refine our eDC software, giving them visibility down to the ISBN level that they needed. We are delighted that our efforts have been recognised by BIFA,” he says.
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