Peerless service: systems make the difference

About Peerless Pump Company

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The Challenge

Peerless Pump's challenge was to ensure their customer’s order processing system is flexible enough to meet business demands and changes.

“When you are a successful, specialized manufacturer with 65 facilities worldwide, knowing where your shipments are at all times is critical,” says the Corporate Traffic Manager for Peerless, located in the company’s US Indianapolis headquarters. “My responsibility is to ensure that the companies with whom we are doing business are effective, regardless of the origin of shipments in our supply chain.”

The Solution

Confidence factor
During 2000, Peerless established a relationship with PSA BDP for the company’s North American business. “[PSA BDP] is handling the majority of our ocean and air exports, imports, and brokerage activity, between the company’s US-UK and US-Asia operations,” Peerless explains. “They are either directly processing our customers’ orders, or we are relying on [PSA BDP] to handle transportation arrangements through their resources.

“Working with [PSA BDP,] we are confident in the quality of freight/ shipment information and updates. It is refreshing to work with a company that puts the customer’s needs ahead of everything else. You can’t put a price on that.”

The reason for Peerless’ confidence? “We are very impressed with the level of information technology support that [PSA BDP] offers,” Peerless says. “In addition, [PSA BDP’s] ocean transportation unit (BDP Transport, LLC) was instrumental in our U.K. headquarters’ decision to establish a broader relationship with [PSA BDP.] Other pluses include [PSA BDP’s] warehousing capabilities, its preparation of documents, protection against violation of US law, and their Customer Order Processing System (COPS).”

“[PSA BDP’s] COPS system works with customers’ order processing systems. It doesn’t replace them or try to force a square peg solution into a round hole,” says PSA BDP’s Regional Account Executive in the Indianapolis office.

According to the Corporate Traffic Manager for Peerless, “No one out there in the market has anything that comes close to the [PSA BDP] COPS system. It enables us to do realtime online tracking, which delivers needed visibility of our freight movements. Its safety features also protect our company through compliance programs, simplification and standardization of documents worldwide, and allow us to generate or print invoices, anytime, any where in the world

“It’s what [PSA BDP] does better than the competition—their system flexes to match the customer’s system. [PSA BDP] does not go in and say, ‘This is what we have, like it or not.’ Our company’s global position, together with [PSA BDP’s] system advances and the potential of placing COPS technology in [PSA BDP’s] Asian, U.K. and German locations, makes this relationship perfect.”

Consistency for control

Walk into a PSA BDP office in Singapore, for example, and it looks very similar to the company’s offices in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York, or any other office location in the US. The same system, a similar office environment. The reason is simple: the consistency gives so much control to the client. “It’s an expensive but necessary commitment for a company to make,” PSA BDP’s Regional Account Executive points out. “[PSA BDP] made that commitment because we saw it as a priority to meet our customers’ needs. And as a privately-owned company, we are able to aggressively fund system improvements.”

This gets back to the vision that PSA BDP has had for over thirty-five years, she explains. “Companies used to say, ‘We’re in the freight business, not the systems business, and if we need a system elsewhere, we will bridge it with another system.’ Any shipper who looks at forwarders will quickly see how unsuccessful it is to try to bridge two systems. That’s been the key to [PSA BDP’s] success and a major benefit to customers. We have never tried to bridge systems. [PSA BDP’s] systems are consistent throughout the world.”

What a customer wants

Like all shippers with global operations, Peerless looks for reliability in all of its activities. “We particularly appreciate that [PSA BDP] has always been extremely proactive,” Peerless stresses. “We can count on [PSA BDP] to look for potential problems, instead of just solving problems. [PSA BDP] works with us, not the other way around. For example, another 3PL provider came in and told us everything they could do. So we drilled down and asked, ‘Can you perform xyz service in a way that flexes to our existing internal practice?’ Their answer was, ‘Sure, anything you want, as long as you do it our way.’”

“It is also very important for us to be able to work with a local presence overseas. The advantage of a company like [PSA BDP] is that if you have an overseas agent that does not perform to your standards, [PSA BDP] helps you find another solution.”

PSA BDP’s services for Peerless are centralized through the Indianapolis office, providing better management of the Remote Location Filing (RLF) requirements, and maintaining a data hub for all of Peerless’ import/export transaction files.

“RLF is important and going forward will be even more important,” says Peerless. “We have many facilities in the US and all of them have import capabilities. It’s also important for NAFTA compliance. We do a lot of inter-company business between our companies in Mexico, Canada and the US. For instance, in Mexico Peerless manufactures parts, which are shipped to Canada for machining purposes at one of our sister plants, and then to the US. A seamless move through one office and one brokerage facility is vital. And the more we import, the more important it becomes to make sure we have a central location for clearance and an effective way to maintain complete import transaction files.”