Better Supply Chain Integration to Manage and Scale Freight

Manufacturers, Distributors, Retailers, and 3PLs - Simplify and Streamline Logistics to Save Time and Money.

Integrating Your Logistics Processes For Efficiency and Savings.

Logistics is complex, made more so by time-consuming processes and the everyday challenges that come with shipping freight from one location to another. As capacity becomes scarce, shipping rates will continue their meteoric rise, making it harder and harder for you to stay within budget.

Fortunately, there is a solution to simplify your logistics. Through integrated supply chain management, you can better control your logistics and supply chain operations.

Why Integrate Your Logistics Processes

To stay competitive in today's increasingly complex and digitally driven supply chains, you need a way to facilitate supplier relationships to keep service levels intact, stay within budget, and meet the diverse needs of your operation. Unfortunately, there is a lot of data fragmentation, making it difficult for you to aggregate the scattered information required to manage logistics activities.

The solution to these challenges is to integrate your logistics processes. That may sound complicated, but studies show it's actually the best way for supply chains to optimize efficiency, improve performance, and adapt to unexpected challenges.

Benefits of Integrating Your Logistics Processes

The logistics landscape is continually changing, influenced by global calamity, and subject to economic uncertainty. It's no longer enough to have a well–functioning supply chain. To achieve real agility, supply chains need to be efficient, flexible, and provide visibility to decision-makers who can adapt to challenges in real-time.

Increase Collaboration and Visibility

It's important to link together as many areas and logistics processes as possible in any supply chain. Doing so not only improves collaboration, it lowers costs, eliminates waste, and speeds up production and response time.

That's why 40% of retail supply chain executives say they want to invest in real-time supply chain visibility, and 70% of professionals across multiple industries list visibility as the top hurdle in the supply chain.

Traditional, non-integrated supply chain models allow different enterprise functions to operate separately. In contrast, integrated models promote centralization to ensure enterprise-wide visibility.

Balance Supply and Demand

In today's global supply chain, business needs to spin on a dime to accommodate shorter product life cycles, emerging markets, and fluctuating economies. Without the visibility of an integrated supply chain, it is virtually impossible to balance your supply and demand effectively.

By marrying innovation with logistics, and effective supply chain management, you can enable your business to respond to demand changes in real-time and better position managers to predict demand and act accordingly.

Increased Flexibility

Supply chain integration gives you the operational flexibility you need to respond rapidly to external events, such as competitors' actions and changes in customer demand.

Integrated logistics gives you the power to gather intelligence throughout your supply chain, enabling you to be more aware of your competitors' planning months in advance.

Minimize Waste

Maintaining a sustainable supply chain isn't easy. Still, a combination of agile and lean supply chain practices can help identify and eliminate waste in the supply chain and enable organizations with greater agility to respond effectively to unpredictability. By integrating data from across operations, you can ensure that your supply chain is sustainable and prosperous in the long term.

Improve Profit Margins

When your supply chain functions as a well-oiled machine, it's easier to maintain and even increase revenue, leading to higher profit margins. Logistics integration provides you with visibility into your operations and your suppliers' operations, which allows for collaboration on reducing costs and driving margins.

What Can Be Integrated?

As demonstrated, maintaining an integrated supply chain is critical to business success. Yet, the process of integrating these disparate concepts is often easier said than done. According to a McKinsey report, large IT projects typically run 45% over budget and only a little more than half of the value expected at the beginning of the project.

Order Management

For most companies, processing an online order typically involves fulfilling the order, managing customer service, accepting payments, and transferring documentation between suppliers, warehousing, and transportation companies.

To manage orders effectively, you need a centralized system to synchronize orders with inventory and store supplier and customer data for later recollection. As one of the primary modules of an integrated logistics management system, order management system (OMS) allows your business to receive online orders from various sales channels and enables your team to monitor orders as they move through the supply chain.

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) sounds like a marketing and sales tool, however, in the day of consumer-driven demand, a well-managed CRM platform is your best tool for success.

Consider some of the companies that successfully use apps as part of their CRMs, such as Amazon, McDonald’s, Etsy, and Starbucks. These companies all take advantage of the wealth of data they collect from users on their apps, like customer preferences, high volume franchise locations, consumer buying patterns, and which products are in demand.

This information translates into valuable insights for them and impacts where to send which supplies, which suppliers deliver the most in-demand products/services, and how well those products and services perform.

Invoicing

Without the right invoicing software, your accounting team faces a daunting manual process of marrying and merging quote and invoice data through spreadsheets and carrier websites to internal data.
Without the line detail from the original quote, it's nearly impossible to determine where discrepancies are.

Pick and Pack/Warehouse Management

It is impossible to effectively improve any business practice without regular evaluation and benchmarking for how things should perform. Your warehouse is no different.

Carriers (Rates/Carrier Invoices)

An integrated TMS platform puts the bulk of the rate shopping process right at your fingertips, with multiple databases to manage carriers, invoices, customers, and other important information.

Rate Marketplaces

A TMS integrated with multiple rate marketplaces, on the other hand, enables your team to shop multiple rates on one screen so they can quickly evaluate and select the best option.

How Integrations Help Reduce Costs and Streamline Processes

The best thing you can do to reduce costs and streamline logistics processes is to use a TMS platform that offers:

• The ability to compare available freight rates
• Automated invoice auditing
• Capabilities for adding carriers
• Automations that reduce manual data entry and subsequent human error

Reduced Double Data Entry

Improved digital connections enable the continuous flow of data, which minimizes the time your team has to spend on repetitive tasks like data entry, improves data accuracy, and streamlines tasks.

Reduced Mistakes

A TMS platform with real-time re-planning and no-touch order processing will automatically adjust the schedule for orders based on updated data in the system.

Planning To Avoid Unnecessary Expenses

Businesses that ship freight are in a never-ending battle between customer expectations and shipping costs. As rates continue their meteoric rise, it is useful to reduce costs with a plan to avoid unnecessary expenses.

Accessorials

Few things are more annoying to those who ship freight than unexpected or unnecessary accessorial charges that hike up rate quotes and gum up the shipping process.

Optimize Boxes/Pallets/Trucks

Another way to minimize cost and avoid unnecessary shipping expenses is to optimize every box, pallet, and truck you ship.

Load Pooling

Having a plan for each load, supplier, and customer can save thousands, but every shipper knows that the best-laid plans often fall to pieces.

Zone Skipping

By consolidating smaller shipments into a single full truckload destined for a specific zone, you can reduce the cost of parcel and LTL shipping, speed up delivery times, and even minimize the likelihood of delays.

Just In Time Inventory

Just-in-time inventory is a supply chain methodology designed to reduce production and response times from supplier to customer.

Efficiency & Savings

Too much inventory leads to product degradation and waste. It can also cause inefficiencies in management and warehouse workflow.

How Integrating Keeps Customers Happy

Your supply chain performance is your hidden weapon to boost customer satisfaction and to increase your profitability.

Internal Customers -Informed of Inbound

Unfortunately, far too many companies let their inbound spend grow out of control because other areas draw a higher priority. TMS integrations can bring a wealth of benefits that help companies better decide where and how to route and consolidate inbound shipments for real efficiency and savings.

External Customers - On Time, Low Cost,Or Informed Of Delays

By integrating your systems, your team is armed with the tools to provide the excellent service, transparency, and visibility customers crave.

Integrating To Accounting

There are many reasons for you to scrutinize your shipping spend. Carriers make billing mistakes, quotes do not match service, your team fails to follow expectations.

Match POS Invoices

One way to stay on top of shipping spend is to get the most bang for your buck during the initial rate shopping process.

Audit Invoices

Not only will employing an effective method to conduct invoice audits catch costly invoicing errors and poor service, but the process also provides you valuable business intelligence.

Streamline the Refund Process

By integrating invoice auditing with a TMS solution, your team has all tracking and delivery information they need in one place.

Pull Together Siloed Data Now

In today’s increasingly complex and digitally driven supply chain, your competitive edge can evaporate overnight. To keep your advantage, you need seamless collaboration, rapid communication, and the ability to coordinate supply chain activities from a centralized system.

Unfortunately, the industry's high fragmentation makes achieving that level of supply chain integration a technical challenge.

FreightPOP integrates your existing business systems to optimize your company's logistics and supply chain planning faster than ever before.