With improving economy, the demand for products and goods is also increasing. Businesses depend heavily on logistics service providers to move their products quickly across the supply chain and to the end consumers that are dispersed around the world. Logistics companies are experiencing great pressure to provide high performance services such as Just-in-Time supply of raw material and on-time delivery of finished products.
Today, logistics plays critical role in the global supply chains and thus greater service levels are expected from LSPs. Automating operational processes with help of logistics software can help LSPs to achieve the expected levels of service. Let us see how processes automation helps logistics service providers –
1. 1.Quick & Reliable Service
Centralising multiple branches and operations into a single platform helps to provide quick and reliable services to the customers. Software for logistics can be usedeffectively to map existing processes and integrate operations. Creating standardprocesses and workflows improves productivity and reduces bottlenecks. Automation eliminates the time and efforts spent in manually re-entering the same data. Eg. For a regular customer exporting the same product tosame location, many fields will remain unchanged such as the name of the shipper or freight classification.
2. Reduce Operational Cost
Perfectly optimising the operational processes allows logistics companies to reduce cost of operations. Automation of processes using logistics software reduces manpower expenses as improved efficiency allows handling more shipments. Automation also reduces the cost of customer service by reducing the time and efforts spent in responding to customer queries. Automating compliance process speeds up the cycle time, reduces delays caused due to compliance challenges and eliminates financial penalties due to errors.
3. Improved Customer Service
Customer service is a major part for a service driven industry like freight forwarding & logistics. Automating customer service processes majorly improves customer experience and satisfaction. Automated notifications over email or SMS can be sent to customer along with daily shipment status report. Logistics software can be used to build a web-integrated customer portal that can automate shipment tracking. Such portal can allow customers to submit new orders, check their bills and outstanding payments.
4. Minimize Costly Errors
Complex processes and documentation are common part of logistics industry. Vast amount of information is required for every shipment and even a small error in manually entering the data results in unnecessarily increasing the cost. Logistics software automates the data entry process and provides features to reduce errors such as selecting wrong freight classification or providing different description of goods (including misspelling) from that in the letter of credit. With automation, information once entered can be utilised multiple times as and when required.
5. Real-time Information Analysis
Logistics companies require customer information and shipment details like location, weight, size, origin, destination and contents which creates huge amount of data on daily basis. Analysing available information can help logistics companies in many ways. It improves the decision making by providing relevant facts and figures. Logistics software allows setting up KPIs for measuring performance of critical business parameters. Information analysis also provides valuable insights to identify avenues for cutting down costs.
6. Flexibility & Scalability
Due to dynamic nature of the industry, logistics companies must be flexible in their offerings and scalable to adapt to the rapidly changing environment. Automating processes with help of cloud based logistics software helps in building flexible logistics organizations. Automation of routine processes helps to handle more shipments when the business grows rapidly.
7. Improved Communication
With involvement of multiple stakeholders, accurate and timely communication is essential for success in logistics. Automating communication with help of state of the art logistics software helps to share Right information to right people at right time. Logistics firms can schedule and share daily shipment status reports which can be directly emailed to their customers. Automatic notifications and alerts for critical milestones can be configured and sent to relevant parties to induce necessary response action.
Perfectly automated logistics operation provides very high quality of service and results in increased customer satisfaction. Automation helps to save labour and resources which brings down operational expenditures. Most important, automating logistics operation helps business growth and has positive impact on profitability.
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