Lexington, KY July 23, 2001 Digital Freight, a provider of Web-native logistics management tools in an online transportation marketplace, today announced that Owens Corning has signed a one-year contract with Digital Freight for freight transportation procurement across five major Owens Corning business units: Insulation, Composites, Exterior, Roofing and Cultured Stone.
Owens Corning first used Digital Freight in January 2001, to create a more strategic core carrier group to handle focused freight business for several divisions, as well as identify new carriers to accommodate additional capacity in other divisions. The $5 billion building materials systems and composites company achieved savings that exceeded their investment within four months of conducting the first DigitalRFQ, an online request-for-quote tool.
Owens Corning executives realized the impact online RFQs had on the corporate bottom line and have now offered more than 70 million miles for bid to transport service providers in more than 10 different online RFQs since January. "With more than 500,000 truckloads a year, it is imperative for us to streamline the logistics process, reduce RFQ cycle time, save on transportation costs and keep the carriers happy," said Terry Heeter, chief logistics officer at Owens Corning. "DigitalRFQ is flexible and customizable making it easy to accomplish all of that and more."
No stranger to e-procurement solutions, Owens Corning's purchasing group has already embraced e-procurement solutions from other suppliers to obtain goods such as bottled water and stretchwrap. "We chose Digital Freight for our contractual freight transportation buys due to the complexity and industry-specific requirements in logistics that call for a niche solution," Heeter adds.
Using Web-native solutions to conduct an online transportation RFQ greatly condenses traditional RFQ cycle time. Previously, Owens Corning used binders and regular mail to execute RFQs, which took an average of three months to complete. The process was very time-consuming and only allowed transportation managers to conduct bids once every two to three years. "Using the Digital Freight Marketplace has reduced the cycle time from months to days, enabling us to conduct RFQs on an as-needed basis while using less man hours," reported Heeter.
DigitalRFQ is scaleable and handles scenarios from large RFQs consisting of thousands of lanes and carriers to small ones with few lanes. Additionally, its flexibility allows shippers to invite incumbent transport service providers or open the RFQ to marketplace carrier members. Shippers may also leverage the DigitalProfile capabilities and search the database to identify additional transport service providers.
