CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY. The consulting firm DIAGMA has been using the UPPLY platform since mid-2020 to enrich the modeling of its customers' logistics networks with precise and qualitative transportation cost data. Interview with Léandre Boulez, Associate at DIAGMA.
Upply: What is DIAGMA’s business and what are its areas of expertise?
Léandre Boulez: DIAGMA is a strategic, tactical, and operational consulting firm specializing in Supply Chain Management. Founded in 1973, it is an independent firm whose mission is to help companies design, set up and operate a Supply Chain that has the intelligence to adapt to their Business Model, at the service of their customers, to create lasting value. Our service offer is based on 3 pillars: Supply Chain Strategy and Network Design (master plans), Optimization of Supply Chain management (forecasts, production and distribution planning, supplies…) and Optimization of physical operations (production, logistics / warehouse, transportation). We support our clients in the transformation of their Supply Chain, from diagnosis to implementation, including the co-construction of the target. We also help them in choosing the most suitable technologies and information systems, and also in integrating new skills, through resource recruitment or training.
Upply: How does DIAGMA integrate UPPLY solutions?
L.B.: We are regularly called to review and optimize our customers' logistics networks and to do this, model them. These models are fed by our own data, but also by those of our customers (transportation prices, historical costs, etc.). We use the Compare & Analyze solution developed by UPPLY to obtain cost data on “exotic” destinations, on new routes for our customers, particularly those by sea and by air. This allows us to save time and obtain qualitative data in a few minutes (vs. requesting rates from multiple carriers, which can take several days). By these means, we consolidate our transportation data and are able to offer more reliable models to our customers.
Upply: Do you have any concrete examples of your use of UPPLY to give us?
L.B.: For a luxury goods manufacturer, we needed to make an air transportation cost study from various airports such as Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan to several non-European airports. Likewise, for a textile distributor, we validated our hypotheses on the differences in land transportation costs for inbound and outbound journeys between France and Spain. For a sporting goods distributor whose global distribution plan we are reviewing, we have been able to include the costs on our client's hitherto unexploited routes via UPPLY. Sometimes, certain prices in the UPPLY database cover a fairly large geographical area, such as maritime rates to countries like Congo or Senegal, or to South America, when in reality prices are different for each port. This is why UPPLY publishes a confidence index (A, B, C, D, E) which makes it possible to adapt and qualify the robustness of the analyses. In summary, we are very satisfied with the UPPLY platform. It allows us to make our data models even more efficient, and to perform sensitivity analyses more easily across various scenarios, to the greater satisfaction of our customers.
Photo: Léandre Boulez, Associate at DIAGMA
