How a Leading Commercial Truck Manufacturer Boosted Reusable Packaging Efficiency Worth $5.1M with Decision AI
Overview
A leading commercial truck manufacturer manages over 5,000 reusable totes across eight manufacturing plants in North America, supporting the delivery of truck parts and components to hundreds of downstream locations. These reusable packaging are essential to maintain just-in-time and sustainable supply flows for both production and aftermarket distribution.
However, as volume scaled, tote circulation became increasingly inefficient. Totes weren’t lost, but many idled for days at end locations, leading to underutilization, increased manual effort, rising dependence on costly temporary packaging, and risking failures on their sustainability initiatives.
The company’s operations & factory leadership had two options: purchase and manage additional tote inventory or unlock better reusable packaging management decision using real-time visibility. They chose Decklar.
The Challenge
To maintain part flow reliability while minimizing packaging and labor costs, the manufacturer needed to:
- Improve Tote Turnaround Across Eight Plants and Hundreds of End Locations: Without real-time insights, recovering idle totes was slow and circulation inefficient.
- Reduce Manual Monitoring and Reconciliation: Operations teams spent significant time tracking tote movement, coordinating recoveries, and chasing updates across sites.
- Avoid Temporary Packaging: Each shipment using disposable packaging costed $20–$25 per shipment, with 100+ such shipments going out daily when totes weren’t available — costs that could have been avoided with Reusable Asset Performance.
- Enable Smarter Planning: Capacity decision around tote purchases lacked data, leading to overbuying or inefficiencies in redistribution.
What They Tried & Why It Didn't Work
- ERP & Manual Logs: Offered no live visibility into tote dwell times or location, making flow management slow and error-prone.
- Periodic Audits: Provided only reactive snapshots and didn’t help identify high-risk sites or underperforming lanes.
- Track & Trace Solutions: First, most trackers in the market were only able to offer the location, that too intermittently & inaccurately when totes moved indoors & outdoors in a plant & across plants. Second, they further lacked actionable intelligence to drive efficient reusable packaging management. Third, it was not easy to affix trackers onto totes permanently.
Enter Decklar’s Real-Time Decision AI with Visibility
Decklar equipped all 5,000 totes with GPS tags and layered real-time location data with predictive & decision intelligence, powered by the Integration Hub to unify data across plants, transporters, and ERP systems.
This allowed the operations team to:
- Easily attach & configure trackers onto totes; few seconds per tote.
- Track tote location, movement, and dwell time in real time.
- Automatically detect idle totes and notify operations teams with clear actions.
- Analyze lane-level circulation trends to identify bottlenecks and underperforming lanes.
- Build persona-specific dashboards tailored for site operators, plant managers, and global operations planners.
Day 1: Operational Confidence Across the Tote Network
Within the six weeks of deployment:
- Operations teams gained real-time visibility of reusable packaging stock across eight plants and hundreds of destinations.
- Exceptions such as dwell time violations were automatically flagged.
- Idle tote recovery improved, reducing the frequency of temporary packaging use.
Day 2: Decision AI Transforms Asset Circulation
By the end of the second month, Decklar delivered deeper strategic value:
- Cycle Count Optimization: The decision AI models benchmarked lane-level performance and recommended recovery actions.
- Persona-Driven Recommendations: Day-to-day operators got idle tote alerts; plant managers tracked temp packaging use; global teams planned tote capacity based on historical flows with the help of Dynamic Replenishment Planning.
- Capital Planning Support: AI-driven insights supported tote purchase planning and helped justify redistribution over buying excess.
- Operational Risk Reduction: Ensured tote availability where needed, avoiding delays to downstream deliveries.
Why Decision AI with Visibility Was Needed Together
The combination of Decklar’s Decision AI + Visibility was essential because visibility alone provided status updates (the location of the totes) but didn’t surface how dwell times or idle assets impacted production timelines, packaging spend, or asset ROI. Decision AI alone could not act effectively without live and trusted visibility into tote location and status. It needed that data to detect violations, predict delays, and recommend actions.
Together, they gave the manufacturer the ability to both see and act proactively recovering idle totes, eliminating unnecessary spend, and maximizing operational throughput and reliability.
ROI Summary
Direct Benefits:
- Reduced Temporary Packaging Due to Non-Availability of Totes: $730K/year (100+ daily boxes at $20–$25 each)
- Manual Labor Savings: $250K/year
- Revenue Acceleration & Capital Asset Savings: 18% better tote utilization enabled higher throughput using the same asset base, avoiding $540K in additional purchases while unlocking $3.6M in additional revenue (with just 1/100th of this new total revenue capacity utilized)
Indirect Benefits:
- On-time delivery promise fulfillment to dealers
- Improved capital allocation and inventory efficiency
- Strengthened trust and reliability with downstream stakeholders
- Streamlined budgeting on capital expenditure on future years
Total Annual ROI:
- $4.5M in direct impact + strategic competitive advantage through operational efficiency, customer experience, and sustainability
Summary
By implementing Decklar’s Decision AI with Visibility, the commercial truck manufacturer transformed tote operations from reactive coordination to predictive efficiency. Without increasing inventory or adding headcount, they recovered idle assets faster, eliminated excess packaging, and protected delivery timelines, while boosting revenue capacity. Decklar helped turn data into action— unlocking value across every shipment, every site, and every stakeholder in the chain.
Ready to eliminate hidden costs and make every asset count? Discover how Reusable Asset Performance and Decision AI can optimize your packaging flows at scale. Decklar makes every tote count—Book a Personalized Demo today.