About ECU
ECU Worldwide is one of the largest less-than-container-load shippers, navigating 2,400 trade routes spanning across 180 countries and 40,000 port pairs worldwide.
Operating with a 4,500-person team out of more than 300 offices across the world, including offices in India, the United States, and Europe, they have accelerated growth into new markets.
Issue
- Locations operated autonomously rather than being integrated into a connected global business network.
- Sales teams typically concentrated on fulfilling orders and resolving issues, rather than actively building customer pipelines.
- In more established markets such as Europe and the United States, resource utilization was not optimized. Some locations were operating at full capacity while others were underutilized.
Purpose of Voyager
At the onset of the pandemic disrupting the global logistics sector, ECU Worldwide collaborated with McKinsey to align their objectives towards a resilient, enduring growth strategy. This strategy emphasized operational unity and developed digital solutions, providing them with a competitive edge.
How it was addressed
- ECU Worldwide wanted a strategy that would make them future-ready and better integrate their people and operations around the world. McKinsey helped them think through what organizational changes and digital solutions could make this happen.
- An intensive diagnostic sprint was conducted and Voyager was developed: a transformation plan that featured four central pillars:
- improving sales efficiency
- transforming operations using analytics
- optimizing the customer journey and
- creating a future-ready organization.
- Identified more than 15 geographies across three major markets – Europe, Asia, and North America – that comprised the majority of ECU Worldwide’s overall business. The company looked closely at
- how sales teams in these regions worked with their customers
- defined growth milestones, and
- conducted customer analyses to pinpoint specific country challenges and potential.
- ECU Worldwide then began working to strengthen connectivity among their sales teams. McKinsey helped build a coordination center that tracks
- KPIs
- Shipment movements, and
- Sales and pricing across geographies.
Decisions in different parts of the world could now be made and communicated across the organization in real-time, rather than taking several days or weeks to coordinate as they traditionally had.
After the initial 18 months, the growth strategy was systematically implemented, consisting of two primary components.
1) Technology transformation
Issue
Prior to this streamlining, data was often reported in different formats across different offices and might take several months to aggregate and review.
How it was addressed
- Creating and streamlining centralized technologies that helped track what was happening across priority markets.
- The company worked with McKinsey to build automated management dashboards that gathered data from each market into a centralized center.
- A newly revamped customer-facing digital sales dashboard, ECU360, used data science to create a customer-centric experience.
- By onboarding new products and vendors onto the platform, ECU360 created a digital ecosystem spanning users across more than 80 countries, the largest of its kind.
2) A complete organizational redesign
Focus
Performance Management – health of the organization and institutionalization of best practices
How it was addressed
- A detailed talent-value assessment identifying the key recruits needed for the organization to achieve the aspiration that we had set for ourselves.
- The automated dashboards enabled to conduct company-wide performance reviews with standardized KPIs tied to overall goals.
- The customer-facing digital sales dashboard bringing more customer insights to ECU Worldwide, resulting in a 25% increase in adoption and 90% customer retention rate.
- A new sales app increasing productivity for the client workforce with more than 60% of bookings.
- A yield management tool tracking value leakages and demand spikes, enabling teams to revamp sales strategies.
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