ITTOOLKIT [ IN PRACTICE ] Walk through any grocery store, and you’ll likely come across products from Riviana Foods. It’s one of the largest processors, marketers, and distributors of branded and private-label rice products in the United States. Its brands include Minute, Success, Mahatma, Adolphus, RiceSelect, and others. Like many companies over the past few years, Riviana has faced challenges
ProvisionAi and Riviana Foods: Get a Load of This
THE CUSTOMER Riviana Foods is a leading rice company and marketer of wild rice. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ebro Foods, which operates in the rice sector across the globe through an extensive network of subsidiaries and brands in more than 80 countries spanning Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa.
Riviana Foods is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ebro Foods, a global leader in the rice vertical. Ebro Foods’ network of subsidiaries and brands spans more than 80 countries across Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. The range of products and weights Riviana ships can present challenges when trying to load a truck so all the space within the trailer is fully utilized. Riviana had been using a load planning solution, but even so, trucks would often ‘weigh out’ before they ‘cubed out’, says Zachary Dale, Riviana’s supply chain continuous improvement manager. OPTIMIZING TRUCKLOADS In the United States, most truckload shipments travel on 53-foot trailers that provide a bit more than 4,000 square feet of capacity, says Tom Moore, founder and CEO of ProvisionAi. Most trucks traveling on highways can haul between 45,000 and 50,000 pounds. Because many of Riviana’s products— like sacks of rice—are heavy, shipments often meet the weight capacity of the truck before they’ve actually filled the space available.
THE PROVIDER Franklin, Tennessee-based
when looking for trucking capacity, especially when demand spikes. One way companies can address this, even when capacity tightens, is to ensure all truckloads are optimized to their maximum legal capacity when they leave a facility. To help its supply chain organization meet this goal, Riviana turned to Auto02 (Automatic Order Optimization), a load- building solution from ProvisionAi. SELLING A BROAD PROFILE As a large rice processor—its plant in Memphis, Tennessee moves more than 10,500 shipments annually—Riviana sells a wide range of products to retailers, industrial companies, and food service organizations, among other clients. Shipments can vary from small, lightweight rice cups to 20-pound bags of rice geared to food service operations. “It’s a broad profile,” says Jennifer Phillips, Riviana’s director of transportation. Shipments generally travel by box car, intermodal, and truckload.
ProvisionAi offers sophisticated suites of optimization tools for load building and transportation load leveling that reduce total supply chain costs.
by Karen Kroll
April 2024 • Inbound Logistics 79
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