A sports manufacturer hits a supply chain management home run

Business without borders: UPS's global network helps Mizuno stay on top of its game, says international transportation manager William Crockett.

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On a good day, a champion golfer like Luke Donald might power the ball 300 yards with his Mizuno driver. But how far did the club travel to get to him?

The long line to the club's origin runs from an assembly line in Georgia to a cross-docking facility in California, to a forge in southeast China and, finally, to a facility in Japan.

Every day, Mizuno USA manages hundreds of such shipments. And the company tracks them all with ease, using Flex^® Global View from UPS.

Mizuno was established in Osaka, Japan, in 1906, by Rihachi Mizuno. Today, the parent company ventures into every corner of the sports world. Mizuno USA, based in Norcross, Ga., focuses on golf, baseball and volleyball.

A helping hand
UPS provides supply chain management – the transportation path from factory to distribution center – for Mizuno USA. Products are shipped by air or ocean freight from about a dozen different origins in Asia to Georgia and a UPS facility in California. There, ocean freight containers' contents are broken down into individual shipments and then shipped onward to customers such as Dick's Sporting Goods and The Sports Authority.

"UPS Supply Chain Solutions^® manages our transportation bookings from factories at origin and matches our purchase orders to what is actually being shipped," says Mizuno’s international transportation manager, William Crockett. 'We create a P.O. here and electronically transmit it to UPS as well as our factory. And then UPS coordinates the shipments from that point for us."

Using a report generated by Flex Global View, Crockett and his logistics team can schedule the delivery of containers and prioritize shipments based on customers' needs. "What's great about Flex Global View is that we can see the progress and the milestones of a container from departure to arrival," Crockett says.

UPS manages Mizuno's vendors' compliance with its Standard Operating Procedure, a guide jointly created by Mizuno USA and UPS. In addition to checking on the readiness of containers for shipments, UPS can forward information from the suppliers through Flex Global View. And if a shipment were to be delayed, Mizuno could communicate in response what action should be taken to facilitate progress.

In this manner, and in many more ways like it, Mizuno uses technology, and UPS's transportation network, to get its products wherever they need to be – on time.

"We don't have people in every factory or every foreign port," Crockett says. "But we do have UPS to manage those origins."

This story was originally published under the headline "Never settle for second" in the winter 2009 print edition of Compass.