Optimize freight costs
Cost saving 7 votes itself in. Covid put the accelerator down on ship costs. Inflation plus fuel surcharges has kept it planted. Everyone is feeling the pinch.
There are several ways to cut costs in shipping. Depending on your volume, variability and ship destinations, one of the easiest ways is through one of the online shipping platforms. Some provide community wide negotiated rates and well documented API’s that enable direct integration to their service. They support label production, customs and shipping documentation and can provide good rates.
But this doesn’t fit everyone’s requirement and many companies have fixed freight contracts and lack agility in selecting freight options based on different time, weight and cubic trade-offs.
To maximise freight savings a workflow automation system should have the ability to:
- Enable live rate shopping between different shipping options – basically putting out a live bid request from the various logistic providers and selecting the best time/cost bid and automatically consigning the shipment.
- Vary ship options based on day of week, time of year to balance deadline ship date
- Vary ship options by weight, cubic and service level to optimise freight selection
- Forward analyse production looking for new combine options for the same shipping destination, working out whether it is optimal to hold an order waiting for a partner to join it.
- Drop shipping – mass shipping individual orders to a destination and then unboxing and consigning them directly into the local postal or courier service provider.
Collectively savings can be rapidly realised as well as tying information back into the organisation providing better customer service where shipping issues are encountered by the customer.
Next > Scheduling: Right product, right time
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