Business View Magazine Apr-2023

16 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 4 new feature that allowed us to respond to one of our customers’ top inquiries for our customer service team: “Where’s my stuff?” The new technology helped customers track their order status regardless of sales channel. We, of course, want to avoid supply disruptions, but when they do occur, it’s important to be transparent and communicate. Univar Solutions has also invested in an automated rescheduling tool that recognizes when a shipment is going to be delayed and notifies customers. When we bring together a centralized business platform and digital tools, we offer suppliers and customers the transparency and self-service capabilities critical in this day and age. 2. BUILD THE RIGHT MIX OF OPERATIONS AND LOGISTICS CAPABILITIES As a chemical and ingredients distributor, it is essential to have the right mix of operations and logistics capabilities to deal with the unexpected. Resilience is all about saying “yes” when a customer asks if we can deliver a key commodity. An example can be found if one transportation mode is impacted by a work stoppage, embargo, or other issue. With these occurrences increasing across supply chains, the impacts on critical industrial commodities such as chlorine, can be felt not only by customers but also by society as a whole. At Univar Solutions, we have developed a flexible transportation model that allows us to respond to capacity and reliability issues by diverting shipments to alternative modes of transportation. How? By pairing our own fleet with dedicated capacity that we have secured with common carriers. In the past few years, we have pivoted to more of a committed capacity model and that strategy has been a boon to our business. Before the pandemic, Univar Solutions, like many shippers, secured trucks in the spot market. That strategy works when there is a lot of trucking capacity. But when there’s a shortage, it can lead to big swings in pricing. When you secure dedicated capacity with preferred providers, you might have to pay more but you also gain a measure of control over a pool of trucks. Univar Solutions typically uses its private fleet to serve customers within a 250-mile radius of our warehouses. We have the flexibility to send our carrier capacity longer distances. And our transportation management system connects with our supply chain partners to assess and analyze the most efficient way to move loads. To improve our ability to deliver products quickly and safely where and when they are needed, we continue to invest in our logistics strengths. We’ve added warehouses (including a new facility in British Columbia, Canada, scheduled to open later this year), terminal tanks for bulk chemistries, and rail capacity. On the operations side, we’ve been adding to our formulation and application development capabilities. Resilience means the ability to do whatever it takes in the moment to satisfy a customer. When certain chemicals and ingredients experienced shortages in the past two years, our lab services teams were able to