Bayer Crop Science tackles shipment visibility

By Steve Banker

Last September, FourKites had their FourKites Visibility 2022 user conference. At the conference, my colleague Chris Cunnane moderated a panel that included Johnny Ivanyi, Global Director of Distribution Excellence at Bayer Crop Science. Later, Chris had a chance to sit down with Mr. Ivanyi and dig deeper into Bayer’s visibility and digital transformation journey.

Bayer Crop Science manufactures products for crop protection and nonagricultural pest control. The company also produces seeds based on plant biotechnology. In addition to conventional agrochemical business, it is involved in genetic engineering of food. In 2002, Bayer AG acquired Aventis (now part of Sanofi) Crop Science and fused it with their own agrochemicals division to form Bayer Crop Science. In 2016, as part of the wholesale corporate restructuring, Bayer Crop Science became one of the three major divisions of Bayer AG. The global headquarters of Bayer Crop Science is in St. Louis, MO.

As visibility has become more important globally, more and more companies have realized they need to incorporate the solution into their overall supply chain ecosystem. Bayer Crop Science is no different. Bayer started with FourKites in 2018 in Mexico. Initially the implementation of FourKites was part of a larger go-to-market strategy designed to help the company improve its’ Net Promoter Score (NPS).

When it comes to measuring customer loyalty, the Net Promoter Score survey is a best practice. The net promoter score is based on customers’ response to a single question: ″how likely are you to recommend this company, product, or service to a colleague or friend?″ When a company’s net promoter score falls, a company has problems; NPS is correlated with revenue growth.

Prior to using FourKites, the company was using whatever method of providing visibility that it could. Usually this meant providing ″visibility″ to customers that were nowhere close to real-time. While Bayer Crop Science had a transportation management system that they were satisfied with, the system did not span across all the company’s transportation modes. The company was able to track shipments over the road but had little visibility into air and ocean shipments.

Implementing the FourKites visibility solution improved satisfaction by giving customers more accurate estimated times of arrivals (ETAs). This information was crucial to Bayer for improving its Net Promoter Score. Within a short period of time, Bayer Crop Science had seen significant improvements that were improving the customer experience. Bayer was also able to use the more accurate data on the actual times of arrival to improve their transportation process and better hold carriers accountable. This led to significant improvements in on time delivery. The company’s cost performance – at the container level - also improved. Bayer’s success in Mexico led the company to do a global rollout of the solution. The more widely the solution was deployed, the better their results have been.

Rarely do implementations of enterprise applications proceed on time and on budget. But Bayer felt that for the most part, their implementation did. Implementation timeframes did vary by country with nations that had a lower level of IT sophistication taking longer. Getting value out of a real-time transportation visibility solution also requires the cooperation of carriers. In some nations, transportation partners were more open and able to share their telematics and GPS data. In other regions, this was a heavier lift.

Supply chain visibility is part of Bayer Crop Science’s overall digital transformation. The company is also looking to build a center of excellence for all digital transformation initiatives. This includes the use of digital twins, the combination of customer service and logistics in one view for planners, and a journey toward making more decisions based on analytics rather than an individual’s gut feelings. While the company is still mapping out its digital transformation journey, supply chain visibility provides a solid foundation to build on.