CERAMIC INDUSTRIES, a business at the forefront of innovation, automation and technology in the ceramic tile and bathroom industry, manufactures one out of every two tiles, baths and toilets purchased in South Africa.

The challenge

The company operates in an extremely complex and competitive environment. The group comprises seven factories, shipping in excess of 2,900 tons per day across South Africa using external transport providers.

It needed an integrated supply chain solution for better visibility across all operations.

The solution

Ceramics Industries partnered with Inhance Supply Chain to deliver a truly integrated supply chain solution. The solution provides business-wide visibility of its operations through its overarching control tower and intelligently manages orders from point of placement through to delivery at customer.

Using a complex and powerful solver developed by OPSI Systems, the solution can dynamically build, plan and allocate least-cost transport routes against service- level agreement (SLA) and manage the order through to delivery. The real-time yard management solution continues to manage the order from transporter arrival through to dispatch, ensuring constant visibility of an order against plan.

The outcome

In an environment where you are servicing an ever-increasing and splintered customer network, the solution has empowered staff with the right tools to manage this growth, enabling the business to further increase throughput to end customer whilst reducing its cost to serve. With auto allocation, EPOD and automated invoicing coming soon, both

Ceramic and Inhance continue to strive for a truly autonomous supply chain.

The solution has been running for two and a half years and to date has delivered an ROI of over 600 percent, enabling Ceramic Industries to further increase supply chain efficiencies and delivery footprint whilst improving customer service levels.