Is your Unplanned and Expedite Freight a Black Box?
Manage and Reduce your Freight costs for expensive Express services, courier services, unplanned freight, expedite shipments, special requests and/or project shipments.
Imagine you are in transport or responsible for your companies freight budget and you are looking for ways to make your live easier and more fun. At the same time you are looking for ways to reduce your freight cost as these are extremely high and only continue to increase further?
Obviously for most of your transport and freight needs you have contracts in place. However, do you have a clear view of all transport and freight booked outside of the standard? Those for which no rates are in place? Mostly these are unplanned, unexpected, expedite, project or special shipments. Often these are booked under heavy time pressure and are in most cases very expensive shipments.
When raising the question how often it occurs that you need to reach out to carriers for an adhoc (spot) freight quote, you might think this this hardly happens as contracts/rates are in place.
When asking the people involved in the daily transport and freight execution they state it actually happens frequently, often multiple times per week, they need to reach out to the carriers for a (special) freight quote. The reason is that mostly the standard rate or contract agreements do not cover an expensive service, courier services, unplanned freight, expedite shipments, special requests and/or project shipments.
As these tend to be expensive shipments it is important to spend some time on sourcing the right carrier that offers the best service at the most competitive price. In reality, as the shipments often occur under time pressure, just one phone call is being made or an email is being send and the shipment is booked. This may sound the easiest and fastest, but also is the most expensive approach.
Not only is this approach extremely expensive, your spend, process and agreements around these shipments are becoming often a big black box.
Just ask yourself. Do you know what is being spend in your organisation on expensive courier services, unplanned freight, expedite shipments, special requests and/or project shipments/ freight? Is your team sourcing an comparing rates for these shipments? Or do you just send an email or make a phone call to that one carrier that you know and can handle this for you? Imagine what could be your savings on this part of your freight spend!
Ofcourse it is a hassle and time consuming to find out, which carriers, beyond your current carriers that you use to carry out your expensive express or courier shipment, your unplanned freight, expedite shipments, special requests and/or project freight. Next to that you need to reach out to multiple carriers by phone and/or email and then followup with them. They might have questions for you as the request is not fully clear, you then need to answer these and chase the carrier to speed up as time is of essence given the urgency of your request. Once you received all quotes back, you need to compare all offers, maybe by even putting it into an Excel.
When you are finally done you can reach out to the carrier of choice and make all arrangements and exchange documents. The carriers that you not chose, you need to send an email to thank them and inform them you will not make use of their services.
In parallel you also might need to keep colleagues informed on the agreements you are making. They might need to step in or take over at one point when you are not around. They as also includes Finance.
Do they always know and understand where the invoice came from for these shipments and what it was about?
Can you retrieve back a few weeks after the arrangements were made was exactly was agreed under what conditions and at what price, or would you then need to start digging in your emails?
The above process describes how most organisations typically deal with expensive express shipments, courier services, unplanned freight, expedite shipments, special requests and/or projects.
A missed opportunity especially with the extreme rise of freight cost.
The solution is to digitize the process. Zendeq offers you the solution. We have build software as a service to deal with and manage the entire process solving all challenges as described above. You will be able to continue to work with your existing carriers, but also invite new ones that match your requirements.
In case you want more information or a free online demo, please reach out. You can also immediately sign up for a free trial and give it a try.
