Kimberly-Clark — Cutting Appointment Time by 80% with Appointment Manager

With five $1 billion brands, Kimberly-Clark's supply chain is a complex network serving highly variable demand. Distribution-center associates were swamped by the tedious task of managing facility shipping and receiving schedules, which siphoned valuable time from growth initiatives. The process was cumbersome, requiring five steps and multiple systems accessed to book a single appointment (request live load times, see available slots, select preferred slot, confirm slot, update offline appointment calendar) — and any rescheduling repeated it. Booking averaged 10 minutes and required accessing 5 systems, with no central record keeping.

Kimberly-Clark worked with FourKites to create a digital environment where associates and carrier partners could interact to manage site pickup and delivery schedules together, keeping everyone on the same page. With Appointment Manager, booking dropped to a two-step process with zero emails and only one system accessed across corporate, site and carriers. To better plan for and mitigate exceptions, the team surfaced Dynamic ETAs of inbound trucks to frontline associates for a more proactive approach to appointment times, and used an API to automatically update confirmed and rescheduled appointments within their TMS and ERP. Appointment Manager also created a more dependable way to manage capacity — limiting slots booked in a day or reprioritizing teams when an ETA differed from expected.

Kimberly-Clark reduced the time spent on booking appointments by 80%, with zero emails and only one system to access. In its first time using Appointment Manager, the company was able to save 2,000+ hours of work, schedule 15,000+ appointments, reduce email traffic by over 60,000 emails, and achieve automatic reduction in fees. The two-step process freed up time to deliver on its vision of a 'Purpose-Driven Supply Chain.'