It’s not just about responding to what a business wants, but knowing it well enough to identify what it needs.
When you’re a Canadian pulp and paper manufacturer with critical customers in Asia, transport delays mean missed deadlines – and missed deadlines aren’t good for longstanding business relationships.
But one such company in northern Alberta, Canada, faced precisely this predicament in the aftermath of their home province’s economic downturn due to declining energy prices.
When Alberta’s booming energy sector softened along with the price of oil, the province’s primary rail carrier reduced its total number of rail cars in response to withering demand. For our customer, this meant they could no longer easily get their product from their facility in northern Alberta via train to the rail yard in the province’s capital, where it would be loaded onto westbound locomotives headed for Vancouver and eventual sea transport to Asia.
The customer already had a long-standing relationship with Livingston and one of our trade experts, who had been dedicated to the account and understood the company’s needs and restrictions. But until late 2017, their relationship with Livingston was primarily focused on the coordination of occasional ground or air freight services for machine parts and packaging materials, rather than their core product.
By using Livingston for both ground and sea transport, our customer was able to reduce the complexity of their supply chain while saving money and reducing time in transit.