Eyefreight
Helping the world's biggest brands tackle complex shipping challenges

The importance of managing and optimizing costs for shippers rises as external factors continue to mount and drive shipping costs ever higher. A 2014 study by MHI and Deloitte Consulting LLP found more than 70 percent of respondents across industries consider cost-controls a top priority for their companies and their customers.

“Supply chain visibility is crucial to support customers’ growing need for detail on delivery and cost," begins Ken Fleming, CEO of Evanston (Ill.)-based Eyefreight.

Eyefreight improves margins for shippers by slicing up to 30 percent off the net landed cost of goods, which includes both cost of distribution (CoD) and cost of manufacturing (CoM). Having squeezed as much as they can from CoM, manufacturers are turning to CoD as an area where they expect to define new efficiencies.

Eyefreight offers a SaaS transportation management system (TMS)that empowers shippers, deploys quickly and can generate ROI in six to 12 months. SaaS-based systems provide an increasingly popular option to shippers, who are replacing their legacy and consultingbased transportation management systems with SaaS, or cloud-based, solutions. Many Eyefreight customers typify this trend, rejecting the typical decade-long implementation processs and data center requirements of previous-generation systems, in favor of the SaaS approach.

Shippers use Eyefreight to improve strategic management of inventory and carrier networks, make more informed carrier selections, and gain leverage in their vendor negotiations

Eyefreight enables shippers to execute corporate strategies locally in many of the world’s most difficult to navigate markets.

In Brazil, for example, shippers pay an extra tax each time they cross a provincial border, increasing the importance of shippers to combine long haul and short range vehicles.

France and London have long standing taxes in place to reduce the impact of transportation on the environment. Eyefreight’s decision-making process ensures shippers employ the most efficient equipment, partners and schedules to maximize transportation movements at the minimum cost.

Eyefreight offers the only transportation management system with an algorithm that determines from where inventory should be picked as well as automated decision making, weighing variables and calculations much faster than competitors that rely on manual human analysis, calculations and scenario planning. In addition to its Advanced Planning & Optimization module, Eyefreight also includes Control Tower and Cost Management modules.

Eyefreight’s Control Tower module reports on the performance of the customer’s distribution network based on all the data associated with shipment from the order to the time of delivery. For instance, Heineken, a Dutch brewing company, saw an opportunity to improve transportation management in Romania. Using Eyefreight’s TMS, Heineken could easily select the storage location from which to ship orders to maximize the number of deliveries.

“We work with each client to create a distribution plan, measure the variants against that plan, and calculate exact costs of the basic plan and all the variables,” Fleming asserts. This helps clients determine the cost to distribute a single item to the customer, at a specific time, enabling them to monitor profitability by product line. Eyefreight’s solutions also allow the customers to determine the optimal inventory location for the distribution of goods based on delivery methods.

Founded in the Netherlands in 2009, Eyefreight was named as the Netherlands’ fastest-growing tech company in the 2014 European Tech5 competition. With offices currently in the U.S., Brazil and several European countries, Eyefreight will continue to focus on international growth and expansion.

“We want to bring our solution into the global market. On the technology front, we want to partner with other bestof- breed solutions and integrate with them,” concludes Fleming.