Sonoco keeps rolling with Oracle

Sonoco, a $5.4 billion maker of packaging for food, medicine, and other products, has been generating rapid growth, partly through acquisition. But growth brought an increasingly complex shipping environment that left Sonoco logistics managers scrambling to manage 230,000 shipments each year. Sonoco leaders selected Oracle Transportation Management Cloud to ensure that they could make the system and process improvements needed to take on new business profitably.

With the implementation of Oracle Transportation Management, about 80% of Sonoco orders are now automatically tendered to shipping carriers without any human intervention. A major goal of this project was to eliminate much of the manual labor involved in assigning loads to trucks that take Sonoco packaging materials to various manufacturers. Before Oracle Transportation Management, every one of the company’s shipments had to be manually "touched" by a Sonoco logistics planner and tendered to a carrier.

Now, the team can manage the exceptions and more complicated jobs, rather than touching every load. Logistics planners handle the transportation needs of 250 plants throughout North America, about 6,500 shipping lanes, handling about 230,000 shipments each year. “We’ve never been short on data, but now we have processes behind that data,” says Blake Faucette, Sonoco supply management and logistics process improvement manager. The new system also let logistics managers focus on work such as standardizing and improving emergency processes.

Sonoco implemented Oracle Transportation Management Cloud in an impressively fast 18-week process.