Case study: Speeding up the supply chain

Why the leading private bottled water manufacturer partners with Convoy Bottled Water co., facing off against some of the world’s biggest beverage brands, needs to find advantages in supply chain innovation in order to differentiate themselves. They use this innovation to both maximize the speed at which they can deliver goods to their customers, while also decreasing the cost of transportation. For one regional grocery’s 350 stores, the average order-to-shelf time is over 7 days for most of their beverage suppliers. Bottled Water co.’s average order-to-shelf is just 3 days. Because of their ability to fulfill orders faster than ever before, demand for Bottled Water co.’s products continues to increase, with 23% annual growth over the past five years. Bottled Water co. has partnered with Convoy, one of the world’s most innovative trucking companies, to help double the speed of their supply chain. This partnership helps Bottled Water co. achieve the following goals:
- Improve their ability to ship products directly to customers from production facilities.
- Gain access to valuable data that helps improve supply chain performance.
- Avoid increasing costs typically associated with adding speed to transportation.
How Convoy helps Bottled Water co. reach these goals
Enabling more direct-to-shelf shipping In the past, in order to make sure they could always fulfill customer orders, Bottled Water co. housed inventory at storage warehouses—a very common practice in the industry. But warehouse space is expensive and inefficient, creating more bottlenecks in the supply chain and requiring Bottled Water co. to utilize more transportation services. The overall impact of maintaining these facilities was millions of dollars a year spent inefficiently. Today, Bottled Water co. uses Convoy’s flexible trucking capacity to avoid costly storage and warehouse fees. This strategy doubles the speed of their supply chain and decreases the number of trucks they need to schedule, greatly improving Bottled Water co.’s ability to fulfill customer orders on shorter timelines.


“In this industry, it’s so important that we’re able to keep our customers’ shelves full. Convoy provides us with the trucking services needed to fulfill these orders faster than our competition, while at the same time helping us keep costs down.”— Direct to Store Operations Manager, Bottled Water Co.Interested in learning more? Fill out the form below to get in touch with our team to learn how we might partner to optimize your supply chain operations. We partnered with a customer to develop this story for publication to share insights and ideas with the industry but the names of the company and people have been changed to respect their privacy.