Why are agile freight procurement teams so successful? A study by McKinsey found that they were more resilient to market disruptions, even though their supply chains were leaner than non-agile teams.
This brand new whitepaper has everything you need to know about agile freight procurement and how you can roll it out at your business.
The highest level of service at the best possible rate. That’s the goal as you’re procuring transportation. How do you know you’re hitting that goal? You can use internal analytics, conduct bids, or reference external benchmarks. Our preferred approach is a hybrid of all three: combining analysis of your own service requirements and carrier performance metrics with benchmarks on rates, capacity, and volume to compare your freight network to the broader market.
Request your copy of “Winning is Knowing” to see how leading-edge business intelligence tools can help you see a complete view of the freight markets, adequately plan and budget for your procurement cycles, and serve your business objectives.
The 5 best strategies to overcome the challenges of container shipping management: A Complete Guide
Import and export are extremely complex environments to manage for any industry. It requires detailed planning and critical execution, involving multiple partners, in different time zones, with various expertises. These challenges often result in a supply chain that is fractured. Cluttered information, poor decision-making, and miscommunication are some of the many obstacles that stand in the way of a smooth, free-flowing supply chain. Surprisingly, these barriers are unnecessary and are easily avoided, with the right tools and strategy that is.
Continue reading to discover the 5 best strategies in the industry on how to overcome these barriers and get your logistics running like a well-oiled machine.
Today’s more complex logistics and supply chain management environment has ushered in the need for end-to-end transparency into your logistics operations. The more transparency you have into each part of your logistics operation, the better you will be able to use it to help you succeed in a competitive marketplace. Transparency can improve your reputation among consumers, increase productivity, and reduce operating costs. By using technology, people, and processes, today’s supply chains can produce real-time transparency to everyone in the supply chain journey including manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and even consumers.
By opening up Loadsmart’s proprietary data archives for the first time in our Freight Data Insights Report: A Look Back to Look Ahead you’ll get a look into how your peers are performing by detention and lead time so you can make up for the conversations you missed in the last year and an overview of how to grow your quantitative understanding of your business for the conversations you’ll need to have in the next.
Supply chain and logistics teams are seeking ways to build robust transportation budgets to help their business to adapt to more pandemic headwinds.
While 2020 saw unprecedented market swings, capacity imbalances may continue as the recovery boosts some sectors more than others - making flexibility and contingency planning even more essential to your budgeting process.
As you refine your strategy, building variability into your budget can position your business for success. Download the DAT iQ budgeting eBook to learn how leading transportation and logistics teams are approaching variable budgets and implementing best practices to solve for uncertainty in 2021.
Clearly, the world is a very different place in 2021 than it was back in 2020, with studies by McKinsey claiming that the pandemic has accelerated the growth of eCommerce by up to 10 years. Similarweb's Logistics report dives into the impact that has been felt across the logistics industry with more and more people adopting shopping online for fashion and apparel.
As the world's leading provider of website traffic intelligence, Similarweb enables you to discover what’s really happening online. Our data acts as an indicator for which websites, regions, and categories are receiving the most traffic and will need to scale their order fulfillment.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the automotive industry was reeling. After new vehicle sales notched an impressive 8.4% year-over-year gain in February, sales tumbled for the next two months. In April, new vehicle sales were down 46% from the same time last year. The short-term
outlook was grim, but now the industry has flipped, and things aren’t slowing down. What’s to come of all this?
Procurement teams in logistics are frequently faced with challenges such as a demand for rapid spot bidding, particularly across ocean and air freight. Sourcing optimization empowers professionals in transportation sourcing to make better decisions about selecting carriers and suppliers that balance cost, reliability, and other important factors such as incumbency, alternate routes, and CO2 emissions. The solution can easily address a wide range of its logistics spend needs and usually generates 100%+ ROI after just one sourcing event. To help transport procurement teams better build the business case for sourcing optimization, get this 27-page guide that includes case studies, practical checklists, and internal worksheets to help with your assessment and evaluation.
Are you looking for ultimate transparency for your time-critical shipments? In Airspace’s latest white paper, learn about the key issues that hospitals and laboratories face when transporting critical medical specimen shipments, and how shipping automation has prevented devasting delays for customers.
In March 2020, the novel coronavirus disrupted communities, commerce,
industry and our way of life. We have yet to realize the full impact the virus
will have on the future of business. One thing that has become clear is that
business continues to move, and there’s no industry where that is more
important than logistics.
In recent years, the trucking industry has seen an influx of new technologies that promise an alternative to the existing annual RFP for truckload capacity. Adoption of those new approaches to truckload procurement have seen fits and starts as the industry has alternated between periods of tight and loose capacity. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly shifted the supply chain, upending shippers’ transportation plans and accelerating their search for new alternatives to traditional transportation planning and procurement. To read more please click on the download button.
The need for LTL expertise is growing as rapidly changing consumer habits have profound impacts on the overall supply chain. A noticeable gap in LTL educational resources drove SMC³ and LogisticsTrainingCenter.com to create LTL online courses and the industry’s only online certification program. The on-demand learning platform enables students to focus on one or several areas of LTL, hear from industry experts, and learn at their own pace. The online education program delivers more than 40 hours of content, and offers professional certification (CLTL) as well as non-certification paths.
As wind capacity continues to grow in North America, driven in part by federal tax incentives, port infrastructure and labor capabilities are crucial factors for shippers selecting ports with adequate breakbulk capabilities. In the Pacific Northwest, development of the Columbia River High, Wide and Heavy Corridor aims to improve infrastructure and competitiveness of the region, where Port of Vancouver USA has reflected recent trends with back-to-back record years in wind transport. Access this whitepaper for a detailed report on voyage time advantages, record-breaking wind transport case studies, and the far-reaching green energy strategy of Port of Vancouver USA.
In the era of e-commerce, consumers expect to buy any good at the click of a button and have the package arrive on their doorstep within a few days. Reliability, consistency and speed of delivery are paramount to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. Retailers need reliable supply chains and robust distribution center networks now more than ever to keep pace with consumer demand. SC Ports is perfectly positioned to meet the needs of growing retailers.
The extraordinary stress that COVID-19 shutdowns placed on supply chains affected all manner of transportation operations, and less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers and their customers have been no exception. In September, The Journal of Commerce surveyed nearly 100 LTL shippers — more than 40 of which have more than $1 billion in annual revenue and a third of which have transportation budgets in the $100 million to $500 million range — to gain insight into their experience from the early spring shutdowns, through a deep recession, and a rapid, but complicated, freight demand recovery in Q2 and Q3. The ripple effect from that disruption is still with us in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The shipper survey revealed serious problems and detailed significant actions taken and relationship shifts that will be long lasting. Download this JOC Benchmark Study to learn where shippers and LTL carriers need to focus to succeed in this quarter and next year, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect global and domestic shipping.
Disruption is occurring faster than ever before in transportation and logistics. The world is moving from physical to digital, wasteful to sustainable, delayed to instantaneous, and from manual to automated. The pace and disruption force companies to re-think how they do business to prepare them for the future. This provides fertile ground for opportunity and innovation. At Ryder, the future of logistics is now. We help businesses navigate these murky waters with greater visibility and clear solutions that create value. We do this by having the technology, people, and tools in place so supply chains be faster, accurate, and efficient.
The path forward for global container shipping
Container shipping has a paper problem, and it’s never been more obvious than in 2020.
COVID-19 has put unprecedented strain on the world’s supply chains. The pandemic has exposed the shipping industry’s continuing dependence on printed documentation. Cargo has been stuck in ports waiting for physical paperwork to be delivered by flights that have been delayed.
Digital Standards: An investment in the future
In this e-book, the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) looks at what it will take to replace antiquated shipping processes across this highly fragmented, complex and global industry - from electronic Bills of Lading (eBL) to IoT container tracking and much more.
Drawing on the experience of industries such as banking and air transport, it reveals the potential real-world benefits for all parts of the industry if standardized efficient, digital processes are widely adopted. These include increased transparency, collaboration, efficiency and reliability, as well as the potential to make billions of dollars of cost savings every year.
The freight audit and payment industry is a fragmented space divided along a few key dimensions, ones that are explored in the Journal of Commerce's inaugural Freight Benchmark Benchmark Study: Driving Strategic Value Through Outsourcing.
This study, based on a survey of shippers in summer 2020, allows freight buyers to measure themselves against their peers through a number of key metrics:
The study gives shippers actionable insight into how to structure this core part of the freight transportation industry.
Background: A global brand that is involved in retail, entertainment, manufacturing, and distribution.
Challenges: The global company was managing its entire supply chain through spreadsheets for years. The supply chain is the backbone of business operations. So, the company must know all the activities happening in the supply chain to make sure it is working the way it should. Unfortunately, by using manual spreadsheets, the business didn’t have complete visibility over its supply chain and as a result, the company had challenges accurately monitoring its operations.
