enVista Leverages its Supply Chain Consulting Experience in Developing 3PL Transportation Management Operations
Indianapolis, Indiana USA Site Visit
June 21, 2010
By
Evan Armstrong
Key Personnel:
Jim Barnes, President and Sr. Managing Partner, enVista
Stephen Craig, Sr. Managing Partner, Freight Management (3PL, managed transportation)
Eric Schuss, Sr. Managing Partner, Enterprise Solutions (Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP)
Ken Mullen, Sr. Managing Partner, Supply Chain Services (supply chain consulting)
John Stitz, Sr. Managing Partner, Transportation Consulting (carrier sourcing and audit)
J.J. Schambow, Director of Marketing
enVista Overview
We are seeing an emerging trend of consulting/I.T. (information technology) companies offering 3PL services and enVista is one of the firms signifying this trend. Founded in 2002, enVista is a growing supply chain consulting firm which added transportation network management capabilities in late 2008. Its vision is to provide customers with a service offering that includes initial consulting and process improvement work, I.T. and process implementation, and then gives customers the opportunity to operate the redesigned supply chain operation. Executing on this vision, enVista has developed its 3PL operations and is now managing $50M in annualized freight spend and expects that number to increase to approximately $100M by 2011. enVista has a staff of 110 and its 2009 revenues were $12M. There are 12 people dedicated to its transportation management operation.
In addition to its 3PL transportation management services, enVista’s core consulting and implementation services include: supply chain network design, supply chain systems selection and implementation, labor management and productivity metric development, material flow analysis, facility layout and design, LEAN process improvements, supply chain training, Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP/CRM implementation and upgrades, carrier analysis and negotiation, and freight invoice audit/payment through its myShipINFO® Business Intelligence platform.
enVista’s freight audit and payment operation has approximately 400 customers and is processing over 130 million freight bill invoices annually representing over $925M in annual spend. Customers include: Brightpoint, Cummins, Epson, FredMeyer, GE, Hershey’s, Petco, See’s Candies, Sports Authority, and World Market.
3PL Inbound Transportation Management
As a 3PL, enVista is managing around 12,000 inbound shipments a month from retail vendors to customer locations. It is providing some different PO (purchase order) flow management functionality including the ability of vendors to request ship date extensions and even request PO cancellations, all through vendor portals. enVista views developing tier-one inbound management processes as core to growing its transportation management business. enVista is currently using MercuryGate’s transportation management system (TMS) to link over 3,500 users from approximately 3,000 retail vendors for its inbound TM (transportation management) operations. The process overview is shown in the figure below.
enVista Inbound Retail TM Operational Process Flow