How To Improve Fragmented Shipping And Clunky Quoting Processes

"Streamlined shipping" is bandied about by TMS companies quite a bit, but what can a solid shipping platform really do for businesses that organize high volumes of parcels and freight every day?

To answer this, we look at one of FreightPOP’s engineering and manufacturing customers who provide custom hardware and software surveillance and fleet management solutions. They dominate their space with top-tier quality service and are a high-volume shipper shipping both parcel and freight globally.

Customer Shipping Snapshot:

• Heavy parcel shipping - 16K+ shipments globally
• 200-300 monthly LTL shipments 
• Heavy domestic and international outbound and inbound

Customer Specific Challenges

This customer had four specific challenges they wanted FreightPOP to address to streamline their shipping: 

1) Quoting

Our customer complained of clunky quoting processes that would delay their sales cycle. They had a single staff member responsible for obtaining shipping quotes, and the sales team often slammed them with queries. 

The customer also said that manual confirmation emails to carriers and customers were taking a quarter of a single employee's workday, which they found highly inefficient. Lastly, the customer desperately sought to save costs by using their own shipping account numbers (and therefore their better rates) on most orders—something they had no way to do consistently. 

2) Integrations 

Before our customer started using FreightPOP, there were an incredible amount of manual inputs involved on every order. Daily, they would have to log into their carrier and freight forwarder websites to organize and track shipments. Their ERP did not integrate into a transportation management system to pull all the data together for one seamless ordering experience.

The customer dreamed of having their sales team run quotes that would relay back to their Microsoft D365 system, giving them the ability to push and pull information. They wanted to be able to scan orders and build packages pulled from their system, eliminating the need for double entry.

3) Tracking

The customer cited very fragmented shipping processes for the various modes they manage, including Parcel, LTL, FTL, Ocean and Air. They needed a way to see shipments in real-time, stay on top of issues, and communicate readily to their customers.

4) Negotiating Better Rates

Finally, the customer was frustrated with their inability to negotiate rates aggressively. Their head of operations would use a manual auditing and a third-party shipping expense optimization platform for some business intelligence but overall found their auditing data to be a "black hole".   
 

FreightPOP's Transportation Management System Delivers!

How FreightPOP met the customer's need:

Results With FreightPOP

FreightPOP's transportation management system gives customers a way to pull information together like never before, drastically reducing the time it takes, potential for errors, and onus on specific team members to obtain quotes and organize shipments. 

The automation, ability to mark special notations, set future shipping dates, group batch shipments, create product catalogs, and create shipping rules with specific user permissions further wowed this customer. 

What can we do for you? Let us show you!