Case Study: How we helped FedEx Express lower parts spend and control costs

FedEx Express is the world's largest express transportation company, providing delivery to more than 220 countries and territories and employing more than 142,000 employees worldwide.

Challenge

FedEx Express came to PartsRiver wanting a rollout of a global data synchronization and procurement portal that covered more than 130 primary suppliers and 2,200 manufacturers.

Analysis

This global initiative involved working with operations teams around the world as well as purchasing, supply chain management and technical systems support. Early in the project cycle, PartsRiver identified not only data quality issues, but inefficiencies in their procurement practices and the parts master database, such as: 

• Significant numbers of duplicate and incomplete supplier part numbers.
• Inaccurate manufacturer data.
• Multiple purchases of a single part from several suppliers, most of which were not preferred vendors.
• Incomplete, inconsistent and erroneous industry standard codes.
• Data corruption attributable to data conversion.
• Noncompliant product or pricing data provided by the suppliers to the parts master.

These inefficiencies resulted in significant supplier overcharges, warranty claim rejections, excess procurement costs and costly data entry duplication.

Solution

Using our proprietary technology, we analyzed, cleansed, standardized, validated, synchronized and classified all of FedEx Express' data to enable them to: 

• Lower total parts spend.
• Ensure compliance with purchasing programs and contracts.
• Enhance vendor compliance to contracts.
• Consolidate procurement among fewer parts and suppliers.
• Reduce parts inventory levels and carrying costs.
• Eliminate redundant parts purchasing and inventory.
• Reduce write-down of obsolete and superseded inventory.

Result

PartsRiver's data quality services are projected to save Fed Ex Express in excess of $6.5 million annually.