Formed in 1890, Kuehne+Nagel is a world class global logistics provider with top ranked services in sea, air, road and contract logistics. The company provides market leading supply chain management services helping company’s drive competitive advantage by leveraging people, processes and technology to create best-of-breed supply chains.

Headquartered in Schindellegi, Switzerland, it has been successfully providing logistics solutions for more than 130 years to customers across the global construction, equipment, financial services, logistics, and professional services industries. Its global logistics network spans more than 100 countries, incorporating 1,400 offices and distribution facilities, staffed by over 78,000 logistics experts who speak the local language and understand the local culture.

 

Market pressures

Despite the many radical changes to logistics practice from globalisation, consumerism and technology, Kuehne+Nagel has not just evolved with these shifts but helped to shape them. They ensure that their company structure, global presence and technical capabilities are always under the spotlight for continuous improvement. Every day Kuehne+Nagel goes above and beyond to meet the needs of its customers, by anticipating challenges and applying a visionary mindset to advance global trade as a responsible participant in international communities.

Within the ocean freight business, Kuehne+Nagel’s International Supply Chain (KN ISC) service provides global, end-to-end, and highly innovative solutions to companies in Retail, Consumer, Fashion, Footwear and Apparel, Industrial, Hi-Tech and other Industries. This set of value-added solutions allows Kuehne+Nagel to differentiate with a mission-critical value proposition for its customers. That value is enabled by next generation innovation in services and technology that have helped Kuehne+Nagel to grow sales, and win more and bigger deals in a fiercely competitive global industry.

 

Solution

Kuehne+Nagel had a long-standing technology partnership with GT Nexus that started in 2013, to deliver cloud-based global logistics visibility and control for key international supply chain customers.

To enable their new growth strategy, Kuehne+Nagel announced Infor Nexus in 2018 as part of its dual platform technology approach providing options to meet its customers ever expanding requirements and complexity. A major part of the Kuehne+Nagel-Infor partnership has the drive to constantly innovate service offerings using technology to be the first and best movers in the market. The collaboration has pushed frontiers across executives, products, delivery, client success, and account management stakeholders to make this partnership strategic. End-to-end visibility and control of supply chain processes are critical to managing the risk and reward of global manufacturing and procurement.

Kuehne+Nagel provides the capabilities, infrastructure and expertise to help customers create and maintain robust inbound supply chains, across supply chain partners. Kuehne+Nagel is an acknowledged pioneer in logistics information management and Infor Nexus has proven a trusted business partner in supporting its professionals with a network and application suite that helps in planning, controlling, monitoring, measuring, reviewing and most importantly, delivering value across the supply chain.

Over the last two years, Kuehne+Nagel’s International Supply Chain Management has achieved a number of milestones with the Infor Nexus platform:

• Increased new customer wins by over 50%
• Increased transaction volumes by 3X
• Expanded sales success into new markets
• Brought new Infor Nexus capabilities to market
• First 3PL to deploy the Network Transportation Management (NTM) Optimizer and the Factory Management module for specific customer needs

 

As Kuehne+Nagel has grown its business, each customer win represents a new technology project. Implementation to onboard new customers and their specific supply chain partners to the Infor Nexus network typically is completed in a few months. Program management ensures that as supply chains evolve and business needs change with each customer, KN ISC can swiftly deploy new solutions that may involve both proprietary Kuehne+Nagel technologies and Infor Nexus. Multi-national customers may require multi-stage projects, for example, onboarding a new division or regional business unit to the existing global services already managed in the Infor Nexus network.

With its market-leading design as a cloud-first network for multi-enterprise, multi-national supply chain operations, the Infor Nexus platform covers all shipping modes, international and domestic, and both inbound and outbound flows – all are essential parts of Kuehne+Nagel ISC customer solutions. Leveraging the strategic visibility and multi-party synchronization made possible by the network, the Kuehne+Nagel experts drive value to the customers for better performance at lower costs through better managed lead times, increased product velocity, and exception management, closely aligned with each customer’s business needs.

Projects involving Kuehne+Nagel have been the most innovative, addressing high complexity, at work across the Infor Nexus ecosystem.

The cloud-based, Infor Nexus supply chain network platform helps solve global business problems and deliver multi-enterprise value, and Kuehne+Nagel have been ‘first movers’ among the top logistics service providers (LSPs) that make use of that platform. They have pioneered application of newer functionality like the Optimizer, and more focused solutions such as Factory Management and Transportation Sourcing.

As a global business, Kuehne+Nagel is acutely aware of the highly interconnected nature of business and community in logistics operations, of ‘network effects’, and this informs both their growth strategies as well as their service offerings.

“Ongoing transformational development is changing our customers’ mindsets, expectations and behaviour. It influences how we are perceived and how customers interact with us., Eric Williams, Global Head International Supply Chain, Kuehne+Nagel..”

“Without the logistics industry we wouldn’t have access to the products that power our lives, the medicines that prevent and cure disease, and the ability to respond to global crises with critical supplies and life-saving nourishment.

We wouldn’t have access to impact. This access brings with it a responsibility to focus not only on profits, but on people, communities and the planet we all depend on. That’s why we work hard to connect our network and our knowledge with the needs of the more than 800 communities where Kuehne+Nagel colleagues live and work.”