Logistics Tracking and Reporting - A Complete Guide | FreightPOP

TRACKING & REPORTING ON SHIPMENTS

Supply Chain Visibility and Capturing The Data that Matters

Tracking inbound and outbound freight helps you proactively manage issues and customer expectations. Analyzing your shipment data helps you plan ahead. You need both.

Guide to Inbound and Outbound Shipment Tracking

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Freight Tracking and Reporting

You simply must analyze your business processes to grow. There is no way to know what needs to change if you don't set benchmarks and evaluate your success. When it comes to freight shipping, both inbound and outbound, inefficiencies impact customer service and carrier relationships, and can lead to lost sales or higher costs. Transportation management systems that can make tracking and reporting easy are cost-effective for any business.

Supply Chain Visibility

Tracking parcel and freight is no longer a matter of simply tracing where items are from carrier notifications. You can now track inbound raw materials or outbound goods in real-time and make decisions to keep a proactive upper hand in meeting and managing customer expectations.

Investing in technology to allow greater visibility, and therefore better control, can also lead to some cost and time-saving benefits, such as allowing customers to track shipments on a self-serve basis. Some shipping software allows your team to view orders in a dashboard configuration so you can quickly see inbound and outbound shipments to enable troubleshooting. Some software also allows automatic email notifications to customers or 3PLs possible based on triggers you set up - such as an automated notification letting a customer know a shipment is experiencing delays.

Inventory Control

In today’s commerce environment, you need to minimize backlogs. Backlogs or back orders used to be a merchant standard, but today’s shoppers have far too many options. The item they seek may be found just a quick google away.

Your first step in ensuring greater inventory control is to set up a system using scanner technology to maintain real-time data on stock levels. This system should include smart alerts that notify when replenishments need to be ordered. These alerts should consist of projections based on item order history, seasonality considerations, and how long items take to receive from your supplier. A warehouse management system that gives you this kind of visibility also generally offers a way to set up triggers, so stock is automatically ordered without human involvement required. Your integrations should connect your WMS and ERP to every order channel. This allows customers to see that only a limited number is left (which encourages them to buy) and also lets the customer know when something is not available, avoiding a back order scenario.

Leverage Data To Be Proactive

Too many small and midsize businesses are still using heavily manual processes to track orders. Without automation and freight tracking software, businesses can have difficulty in even knowing if an order has been scheduled or delivered. These businesses are limited in how they can assist customers, troubleshoot issues, and they encounter more shipping penalties than those with modern shipping tools.

Another example of how tracking data can help business leverage is with third-party (3PL) businesses. 3PLs can take their tracked data over a period of time and convince their customers to use their contracted carriers and shipping rates. By proving carrier service levels and showing a tracked history of what their savings would be over a period of time, those customers are far more likely to use the 3PL or broker’s rates.

Multimodal and Intermodal Tracking

Shipping across transport modes is referred to as either multimodal or intermodal. Multimodal is when the same carrier is contracted with throughout the entire journey of the parcel or freight. Intermodal is when multiple carrier contracts are involved covering various legs of the journey. Freight optimization software compares those mode combinations on every order.

In terms of staying on top of shipments, multimodal is usually the easiest way to track as there is only one carrier to follow up with. Shippers often select intermodal options due to cost, service quality, and in situations where they require flexibility.

If your business frequently ships either multimodal or intermodal, you’ll need to select a shipping software, or a TMS, that can keep up with tracking multileg shipments - not all of them are capable! Some TMS systems are also capable of providing automated truckload tracking and offer broker dashboard functionality, whereby 3PLs can log into your software and track shipments they are involved with. If you ship a lot of intermodal shipments, having additional tools to track quickly will save your team time and give you greater control.

Proactive Alerts/Notifications

Real-time altering and automatic notifications help you do several critical things, such as:

The TMS solution you use should give you a range of options for proactive alerts and automatic push notifications. Some TMS platforms even allow user-defined alerting, enabling you to curtail internal messages and external customer service emails/texts based on specific triggers.

A solid TMS should give you real-time alerts, which will save your team hours on manually checking status updates on carrier sites. Real-time alerts make responding to customer queries more efficient. A dashboard with red flag notifications is extremely handy as well if you ship in considerable volumes. These tools keep your team working proactively.

When creating notification messages for customers, keep in mind the typical concerns buyers have after they place an order. They want to know how to track an order, so give them a link. They want to know how long an order might take to reach them, so provide them an estimate. They want to know how to return orders, so ensure this information is readily available to them in the order confirmation email.

Alerts and notifications not only make processing orders more efficient and less time consuming for your team, but this leads to a better experience for customers. Proactively communicating with them gives them a better shopping experience overall. This effort leads to customers being more patient with you when things go awry and helps cultivate loyal customers.

Tracking Return Shipments

Customers tend to be less patient during the returns process than they are during the purchasing process, so it is vital to treat returns with as much importance as processing orders. Make sure your team understands this. Establish a clearly defined returns process that you communicate to customers at the time of purchase and during the returns process.

Making use of automated notifications so you can keep customers in the loop on the stages of the returns process - confirmation on return request, confirmation that returned product has been received, and confirmation when monies have been credited back. You can learn more about creating a returns process in our Digital Connectivity For Freight & Shippers Guide.

Logistics and Supply Chain Reporting

The Power of Analytics

When using analytics to evaluate aspects of any business, the goal should be to eventually get to the point where you can predict what will happen to control outcomes, rather than relying on responding to situations as they come up. Prediction gives you better control and usually avoids unnecessary spending in troubleshooting issues.

The analytics journey breaks the steps into four.

Readily Available Data

The competitive benefits include:

Analysis Across Your Shipping Channels

Before you begin, you need to use shipping software or a TMS solution that allows you to look at results across all the shipping channels: Parcel, LTL, FTL, Air & Ocean (International or Domestic), and Intermodal. Analyzing across modes can help you negotiate better on future carrier contracts, among other benefits.

Report Customization

With custom reports, you can:

Conclusion

With today's IoT integrations and amazing TMS solutions available, tracking and reporting should not be daunting, avoided, or too expensive for small and midsize businesses. In fact, smart business processes of having nearly 100% visibility into your entire supply chain, as well as the tools to set benchmarks and KPIs and generate analysis reports are thankfully available now.