An optimised logistics solution for Merlo Group
Helping a world-leading manufacturer to drive revenue growth and brand presence in a noisy market
The challenge
To develop an optimised solution for leading agricultural manufacturer, Merlo, to enhance their customer experience, to gain market share and drive sales in line with company objectives.
The outcome
A bespoke solution and flexible final mile offering, underpinned by technology, to speed-up aftermarket deliveries and make it easier for dealers to source and return parts. With additional visibility Merlo dealers now have the confidence to source and return parts helping to boost both customer satisfaction and drive sales.
The challenge of meeting the rising customer demand isn’t just reserved to the B2C world. Instead, it’s a pressure that’s seeding across to the world of agricultural and construction manufacturing too.
Merlo realised that customer experience was the key to meeting its ambitious growth targets and recognised that both the availability of parts and the speed of delivery put them at risk of lost sales to non-genuine parts.
As an innovative and extremely versatile industrial company, one of their key attributes is that they design, develop and produce most of their components in-house. This ensures it’s always possible for customers to find the best solution for their requirements and it’s just one of the things that makes them so unique. So, ensuring their customers had the right parts at the right time was absolutely critical to their proposition.
Customers sit at the heart of the company, and if we weren’t meeting their requirements, then we needed to change that. We have ambitious aspirations to grow, and we needed to find a logistics provider who could help us meet these needs and importantly, give us a strong foundation to take the next step.
Since the partnership began (only a few months ago, at the time of writing) Carousel has already helped Merlo achieve a 5.8% net increase in parts turnover and a whopping 30% reduction in customer service administration.
What’s more, previously, only 43% of parts arrived pre-10am and could take up to two-days to arrive into dealers. Within just a matter of weeks however, Carousel’s solution means that 84% of all parts are now delivered pre-8am, next day.
And this was all achieved – get this – during a pandemic.
That’s right. The COVID-19 outbreak coincided with the launch of the new solution, but due to Carousel’s unique combination of owned technology solutions, flexible network, and fantastic customer service the two companies navigated the challenges together; to not just survive the crisis, but thrive.
As an innovative and extremely versatile industrial company, one of their key attributes is that they design, develop and produce most of their components in-house. This ensures it’s always possible for customers to find the best solution for their requirements and it’s just one of the things that makes them so unique. So, ensuring their customers had the right parts at the right time was absolutely critical to their proposition.
So how do you go about optimising a logistics solution?
Carousel applies expert solution design with a technology-driven approach to bring ultimate optimisation. And only after assessing the needs of Merlo’s end-customers (farmers/dealers), and the wider company, do Carousel select the most appropriate services from its owned and shared partner network.
By delivering direct to dealers, in-night, Carousel could facilitate an early-morning delivery without dealers even being open. Bringing maximum efficiency and convenience to the customer. The solution helped to achieve 95% & 96% customer service levels in March and April respectively, and these rates are expected to rise post-pandemic.
Carousel selected a dedicated trunking service from Merlo’s HQ, offering the client late collection times, while also allowing dealers/customers late cut-off times for ordering. It was just one of many things put in place to make sure customers had an enhanced experience from point of order right through to delivery.
The flexibility of Carousel’s shared partner network meant that even oversized telehandlers could be incorporated into one solution and controlled by one central platform, bringing huge efficiencies in administration time.
Carousel’s owned service and technology platform, Gateway® sits across the whole solution and allows dealers the visibility to track their shipments – reducing the burden from Merlo’s client services teams and ensuring that Merlo could continue to grow, without the need to reciprocally grow client service support. Dealers could also use Gateway® to track, and book returns via the same platform, further reducing administration for all parties and improving the speed of return and encouraging leaner inventory stockholding.
Carousel’s solution has already brought a tangible return on investment and to have achieved that result so quickly, is quite remarkable. I’ve been amazed by the team’s speed to react, their ability to proactively plan, as well as their effective communication. It’s a great place to be as we continue to work toward our future objectives.
