Case Studies

The project’s purpose was to reduce rail car demurrage for the client’s company. Rail cars are used to move material (parts) from suppliers to the automotive assembly plant and supporting facilities. Demurrages are tariff charges assessed for detaining freight cars beyond their specified time limit. Demurrage charges are billed to the assembly plant from the railroad when rail cars are held at the assembly plant or supporting facilities beyond the contracted amount of time.

A Kaizen (Continuous improvement) initiation project was led by Secora from September 2007 until December 2007 at one of the ‘big 4’ accounting companies in Sydney, Australia. The project reviewed the firm’s process for the completion of international tax returns.

A Tier 1 European automotive supplier had major issues on a newly launched product: Failure to meet customer volume requirements; Failure to meet customer quality requirements; Massive cost overrun. Using the SLIM (Lean) Methodology Secora helped the client to solve its most prominent operational effectiveness issues and reduce internal manufacturing cost to below the original target costing, without capital investment or design change.

Secora was engaged by a major logistics organisation to review and optimize the business processes surrounding the management of third party contractors within its IT Department.