Red Gold is known for manufacturing some of the freshest, best-tasting tomato products in the world! You can find Red Gold products on grocery store shelves across the country as well as in schools, hospitals, and sporting centers. With such an extensive customer base comes enterprise-scale logistics needs. In order to improve its logistics function, Red Gold uses the full suite of Loadsmart’s technology and service offerings. We will explore how Red Gold’s partnership with Loadsmart has enhanced efficiency, service, and improved resilience throughout the value chain.
James Posipanka is Red Gold’s Supply Chain Manager - Logistics. He has over a decade of experience in the logistics industry and has been at Red Gold since 2017. James oversees everything from orders coming in from customers through orders being received at customers’ facilities. He works in concert with Red Gold’s sales staff to make sure anything supply chain-related is executed efficiently. ABOUT
Eric Haywood is the Logistics Supervisor at Red Gold where he manages the outbound logistics team. Before joining Red Gold, Eric worked in a carrier operations role in the 3rd Party Logistics industry. Eric’s day-to-day involves coordinating the processes and activities of Red Gold’s logistics representatives and ensuring the efficient and effective movement of goods.
The Red Gold team is well-practiced in logistics, having successfully supplied customers for over 80 years. As times changed and new technologies were introduced to logistics, Red Gold’s leadership decided it was time to consider adding a transportation management system to their processes.
In 2018, Red Gold met with 20 transportation management system providers. After extensive analysis, they determined that none of the TMSs could perform better or more cost-effectively than continuing with the status quo. The systems they reviewed would be too cumbersome to implement, and the projected ROI didn’t justify the cost at the time.
By early 2020, Red Gold, like everyone working in the supply chain, was dealing with the brunt of the pandemic. The company went into triage mode, and the technology project was sidelined in lieu of making it through the day.
When the dust began to settle from the pandemic, Red Gold’s leadership team began asking themselves what headaches would have been avoided had different technology been in place. There was a concerted effort to begin building resiliency and scalability into the supply chain to help avoid future disruptions and to make current operations more efficient.
Loadsmart asked Red Gold where they were seeing issues in their logistics operation. Red Gold identified its carrier RFP process as an area of strategic opportunity, and Loadsmart suggested RFPGuide, a procurement platform built for the logistics market.
RFPGuide was the first solution provided for customers to help manage the RFP process and evolved into Loadsmart’s full shipper-facing TMS. Unlike other TMS solutions that Red Gold had evaluated for ROI prior to the events of 2020, ShipperGuide TMS stood out for its ease of use and likelihood of being adopted by Red Gold’s seasoned logistics team and new employees alike.
As an early adopter, Red Gold helped Loadsmart build ShipperGuide to suit its and other enterprise-scale organizations’ business needs. As James says, “We weren’t just paying for something out of the box.” With ShipperGuide TMS, Red Gold can plan, procure, and execute shipments with end-to-end visibility and control of their carrier network inside a single platform.
More Frequent Carrier RFPs
One of the first areas of improvement Red Gold focused on with Loadsmart was their carrier RFP process. Before ShipperGuide, Red Gold worked out of spreadsheets, conducting RFPs with only a very small set of carriers through emails, phone calls, and manual back-and-forth. Now, Red Gold sends an RFP through ShipperGuide, and carriers can easily submit a rate for review.
Auto-tendered Shipments
Before ShipperGuide, Red Gold was tendering loads through PDF files they emailed to their transportation providers. An entire role was solely responsible for sending these emails and confirming with the carrier. “Today, we don’t have to do that process,” said Eric. “With ShipperGuide, all of our tenders are sent out automatically through the ‘Auto-Tender’ function.”
As long as a contracted rate is established from zip code to zip code in ShipperGuide, Red Gold’s tender gets sent out automatically. Now, the Red Gold team doesn’t need to touch these orders, the carrier confirms, and it’s executed in the system.
70% of Red Gold’s shipments are executed through auto-tender. To date, this has automated more than 25,000 shipments, saving the team significant time.
Reduced Workload
When Red Gold first adopted ShipperGuide, there were two promotions on the Red Gold logistics team. Because of the streamlined processes and reduced workload, Red Gold decided to backfill only one of those positions. They were able to reduce headcount without an interruption in workflow.
“The scope of our work has completely changed,” said James. “Instead of focusing on manual data inputting, like load tendering and checking carrier tracking information, we now have control over our logistics and are able to be proactive.” He adds, “Workload is just that much smoother for the logistics reps on our team.”
Since adopting ShipperGuide TMS, the reduction in manual processes has made Red Gold’s logistics team 25% more efficient!
Tracking and Exception Management
Before ShipperGuide, Eric’s team would arrive in the morning, download an Excel spreadsheet, and manually check to see what was scheduled for the day. They would then email carriers asking for tracking information. Often, this meant keeping track of 30 - 40 different reports.
“Today with ShipperGuide, everything is right there for us,” said Eric. “It flags shipments if they’re running behind or if they’re unscheduled. Then we can click a button and know immediately which shipments we need to take action on.” This has allowed Eric’s team to focus on the exceptions instead of wasting time following up on loads that are executing as planned.
Fast User Adoption
One of the main hurdles that had prevented Red Gold from implementing a TMS originally was a lack of faith in user adoption. The TMS needed to be straightforward enough that a seasoned logistics professional would find it worth adopting instead of continuing with old processes and user-friendly enough that a new employee could learn on it.
Better Decision-making
Ad-hoc requests from different internal teams will always exist. With access to ShipperGuide’s reports and dashboards, Red Gold can make better decisions based on real data.
Interested in seeing how ShipperGuide TMS can improve your logistics operation? Talk to an expert or schedule a demo here!