We offer a complete eBook bundle for businesses that ship parcel and freight, with tips spanning the full supply chain cycle, from rates, digitizing supply chains, auditing, and more!
There are new norms we are all contending with. Thriving in a beaten-up economy while competing with the retail super giants among us is beyond challenging. Some of us will not make it. As we learned in our post Why Lean Into a Downturn - Redirect, Reinvest, Rebound, those of us who exhibit agile business responses are more likely to succeed.
For those still in the fight, we've been releasing a lot of information on how advantageous it is to digitize your supply chain, automate processes, and access carrier rate marketplaces with Expedia-like shopping. We are now releasing a complete eBook bundle covering the critical phases of shipping: Shop - Ship - Track - Audit - Analyze.
Start Saving Money on Shipping!
Shipping software, or Transportation Management Systems (TMS), do not pose the barrier of cost that they used to for small to midsize businesses. And the return on the initial investment can be life-saving.
We cover many examples in our eBook series on how to streamline your shipping, but three critical areas we highlight here are rate savings, auditing savings, and payroll savings.
Carrier rate savings
We refer to "Expedia-like shopping" of carrier rates a lot, but what do we mean exactly? With the right shipping software, you can open up one website page and with just a few clicks you can shop across:
- Live marketplace rates
- Your own contracted rates
- Spot quotes with a few clicks.
Side-by-side live rates present themselves right after your search, and you can quickly and easily compare based on whatever values you need to for that delivery (time, carrier rating, price, etc.).
With this type of shopping, you do not have to log into multiple carrier websites to get quotes.
So. Much. Time. Saved.
And if you partner with the right TMS solution provider, you can usually access their bulk-partner rates, which opens up more rate deals.
Carrier Auditing Savings
So many businesses are either skipping this step altogether or are doing extremely cursory water-downed audits. There are valid reasons for this, but the result is the same. Money is left on the table.
It boils down to:
- Some companies do not have the staff to audit
- Some try to undertake the enormous task with manual tools and basic spreadsheets
- Some outsource the task, however, 3rd party auditors cannot audit down to accessorial or line item charges
On average, we have found that our customers save around 15% with our auditing tools. What would 15% mean for your company? For companies with an average of 500 LTL shipments a month, this can be a $125,000 monthly savings - approximately $1,500,000 annually!
payroll savings
In our post, Grow Your Business with TMS - More Time & Resources, we share the experience that most of our customers have when they start using our TMS platform. Suddenly less time is required to do many of the shipping tasks. Automation tools and the time saved on shopping for rates, tracking packages, and auditing carriers frees up time. Typically our customers can reallocate staff to other areas of the business - or grow their business - as they have streamlined much of the busywork.
One case in point on how much time savings is possible was with a retail customer who saved 200 man-hours a week within a few months using our TMS. The result was incredible and not isolated. As many businesses slowly rehire staff, the value of tools that cut down on the workload and allow you to relocate workers can be tremendous.
We urge you to check out our free eBook bundle and reach out to us if you would like a demo of how quickly FreightPOP can integrate into your warehouse and ordering systems and get you up and running with a robust TMS!