Why Bel Chose BuyCo as their Ocean TMS

Company overview

With a portfolio of iconic brands like The Laughing Cow, Babybel, Boursin, Kaukauna, and many more, Bel is a family-owned company with more than 150 years of history, and a major international player in the food industry. The Bel Group offers dairy, fruit and plant-based products in individual portions with the goal of championing healthier and responsible food for all.

• Cargo: Dairy
• Shipping activity: Export
• Turnover: $3.4 Billion
• Employees: 11,800

The Challenge

In their constant path towards excellence, Bel was at a place where they were ready to make their maritime operations more efficient and improve customer satisfaction. At this point in time, they and their freight forwarders were principally relying on manual processes, from manually searching schedules and checking tracking status on carriers’ websites to manually creating reports and managing excel sheets. With these processes and a number of different systems that didn’t communicate well between each other, Bel knew their productivity could be improved.

On top of that, disruptions in the supply chain were also increasing with various events like geopolitical instability, covid, and blockages of the Suez canal, etc. Now, Bel needed more visibility over exceptions to be able to react to them more quickly. This is when Bel set out to find a Maritime Visibility & Control Solution.

Goals

In their search for a solution, Bel hoped to achieve the following goals:

• Digitize their supply chain
• Gain visibility over their container flows
• Streamline supply chain processes in their locations across the globe
• Gain more data insights into their operations with automated reports, KPIs and transporter performance

The Solution

Bel found four platforms to compare on the market. Ultimately, they selected BuyCo for two reasons: its user-friendliness and collaborative features. Unlike the other solutions, Bel did not necessarily have to integrate all the tools their teams were using; instead they could invite their teams to collaborate more efficiently directly on BuyCo.

The easy set-up and user-friendly platform allowed them to get up and running with BuyCo right away rather than spending months on integrations, onboarding and training.

Results

Increased Productivity

Now, Bel and their freight forwarders search schedules, book vessels, and track their containers with all their carriers from one place. By centralizing and automating these processes, operations are performed faster and all information can be found in an instant.

Maximized Visibility

With BuyCo’s Container Track & Trace, Bel accesses reliable, multi-sourced data for ETDs & ETAs over all their shipments. They see the status tracking of all their containers in real time and are alerted with exceptions.

Streamlined Processes

Instead of each of Bel’s locations doing their maritime operations differently, everything is now managed in a uniform manner and streamlined. All teams easily collaborate on the platform and work together more efficiently.

Automated Reports

Automated reports are generated on Bel’s daily operations. With KPIs on the performance of their transporters, Bel is able to better negotiate with carriers and optimize their costs and contracts.

“Thanks to BuyCo, we have instant access to reliable data on the performance of our freight forwarders, carriers, shipping companies; and costs without having to do a single thing.”

Yoann Malsch, Bel Supply Chain Export Project Manager

Conclusion

Ultimately, BuyCo’s visibility and control solution allows Bel to be more efficient, provide a better service to their customers and increase satisfaction. Bel plans to continue with BuyCo into the future to provide an elevated level of service to their customers.