In the age of just-in-time supply chain, same-day delivery is becoming the new norm where customers demand more real-time information. Freight forwarding companies that cannot collect, retrieve, collate, and disseminate real-time information about their operations will struggle to compete in the age of digitalization.
The market and customer demands have changed over the past few years, especially during COVID-19; but until today, many freight forwarders are still stuck in their age-old legacy systems and applications that operate in silos and do not generate any valuable insights.
With real-time data, freight forwarding businesses can not only operate quickly, accurately, and more effectively than ever before, but also identify potential deficiencies and issues before they become real problems.
Integrating real-time information enables you to capture shipment information including the delivery time, departure and arrival details, and payment received in real-time, among others; thus, helping you gather actionable insights for each of your customers and shipment.
For example, consider how once a Purchase Order (PO) is received from a particular customer, the integrated freight management system will automatically gather all the information to enable you to create the booking, view details, and decide on the most efficient shipping routes according to the information available in the system. This helps reduce the workload of your staff and job turnaround time. The use of a single database makes the entire process efficient, well-informed, and facilitates collaboration between all parties.
Benefits of Real-Time Information:
- Identification of inefficiencies and issues in advance: Real-time information provides visibility into potential delays, trends, and slowdowns that enables you to address the inefficiencies in advance and make necessary changes.
- Increased visibility: The rise of e-commerce demands that real-time delivery status and notifications be provided to customers. Real-time data allows up-to-date information to be passed to customers with increased visibility. Moreover, real-time data can help in avoiding any potential penalties, fees, and delays for violations of compliance regulations at the point of entry or port.
- Demand planning: Real-time information helps in demand planning by identifying trends and fluctuations for a particular product in a specific market. This helps manufacturers recognize the trends and channelize their resources accordingly and mitigate the risk toproduction and supply chain.
- Better decision making: Right information at the right time can act as a game-changer for your business, enabling management to make a better-informed decision. Real-time data helps identify potential problems at the right time, which can help freight forwarders to evaluate, plan, and inform customers well in advance.
- Enhanced customer service: With ever-increasing consumer expectations, you need to provide fast delivery at minimum costs and with great customer experience. When you have access to real-time information, you can provide your customers with status updates on their orders or shipments at every step until delivery with a mobile app.
- Real-time monitoring:Real-time information allows you to promote better communication and collaboration to make immediate necessary changes in your business operations.
- Improving long-term processes:Persistent use of data-driven analytics can bring positive changes to your freight forwarding business in the long run. Operations like sending notifications to customers for payment recovery, resolving seasonal shipment upsurge, route mapping for specific customer/ shipments and so on can be managed with stored information.
With a highly competitive market, the growing demand to meet customers’ expectations and other stakeholders involved, you need to leverage your data to share accurate information and drive efficiency and customer satisfaction in your business.
Logi-Sys is an ultimate real-time information tool that helps you to bring overall transparency and visibility to your freight forwarding business by integrating operations, processes, workflow, and finances in a single system.
To know more about Logi-Sys, visit www.softlinkglobal.com.
