Customer Need/Problem:

One of Japan’s leading importers/distributors of a variety of products for sale in retail and home center outlets throughout Japan receives varieties of dry, semi-moist, and canned pet food products from locations in Australia, the United States and Asia (Thailand).  Ocean shipments from these locations traditionally have entered Japan primarily through Tokyo/Yokohama and have moved through a series of inland consolidation/distribution and transportation channels prior to reaching their destination locations.  Given the extremely high cost of Japan’s domestic transportation and distribution services infrastructure, this approach has yielded logistics-related costs that are inordinately high (greater than 30% of total costs for the products).

Service Solution

A combination of OOCL’s extensive network of carriage into Kaohsiung from key worldwide locations and its industry-leading service from Kaohsiung to Japan, coupled with OOCL Logistics Hub facility and consolidation expertise have provided a highly cost effective solution.  For imported pet food products, shipments are tendered to OOCL from origins (Australia, the United States, and Thailand) and are delivered to the Kaohsiung Hub and Mixing Center operation.  At this hub location, two basic processes take place:

• Full container loads destined for a range of locations in Japan are routed via the OOCL network to any one of 23 Japan port locations nearest to the actual inland destination.  Through partnership with GLP, a growing Japanese domestic logistics service provider, the containers are transported from the port to the identified inland destinations.
• Shipments requiring consolidation are unloaded and new loads are built (mixed) and sequence loaded to meet specific delivery requirements in Japan destinations.  When shipment is required, these container loads are moved to the necessary Japan port locations through the OOCL Kaohsiung-to-Japan network.

Customer Benefits

This combined mixing service and transportation service significantly reduced the company’s logistics costs (estimated to be in the 15-20% range) through: a) reducing domestic transpiration by delivery to port points nearest inland destinations, b) reduction of operation costs by use of OOCL Logistics value-added mixing services in Kaohsiung, as opposed to more costly services in Japan; and c) lower temporary storage cost through use of the Kaohsiung facility rather than domestic Japanese facilities.