The ability to effectively manage inbound freight is the key to optimizing your global supply chain operations, but it doesn’t always come easy. Uncertainty can often get in the way of managing freight shipments.
You’re likely familiar with shipments arriving too late or too early, which disrupts production and creates delays in the demand chain. Or, vendors ship too much inventory, creating the possibility that your company can’t receive all the goods.
There’s a culprit behind these inefficiencies: manual processes and spreadsheets used to track freight shipments. Spreadsheets are as outdated as an abacus and only offer a snapshot of the current situation. As soon as they are circulated, they contain aged data. Manual entry also increases the likelihood of incorrect data entry and opens the door to costly mistakes.
Fortunately, you can take some actionable steps right now to improve your inbound freight management processes by embracing a better way to manage inbound freight.
Your Action Items to Support Inbound Freight Management
Here are three tips to reduce freight costs, improve reliability, and achieve lasting efficiency in the inbound freight aspect of your supply chain.
1. Improve Relationships With Vendors, Suppliers, and Carriers
In an ideal world, you can use one platform to keep track of everything. However, the reality is these relationships are often spread across multiple systems, making the process cumbersome and prone to errors. To ensure efficient handling of inbound freight, it is essential to be able to manage communications, data, and compliance with vendors, suppliers, and carriers.
By implementing a transportation management software (TMS) platform with supplier portals that can integrate with your existing systems, you can create a single source of truth for your inbound freight data. This effort will enable you to monitor, track, and analyze crucial data points – such as freight charges – in real-time.
This type of visibility creates better communication with vendors, suppliers, and carriers to ensure on-time delivery and keep inbound freight costs in check. It also eliminates many tedious back-and-forth emails, phone calls, and paperwork, freeing up valuable time and resources.
2. Know What’s Coming and When
Too often, inbound shipments are put on the back burner until they arrive, leaving managers and planners scrambling to determine the next steps. Companies should understand which goods are arriving, when they will arrive, and how to best utilize them once received.
With a real-time inbound freight management system in your business’s toolbox, you can ensure that your teams are always informed and prepared. You will be able to:
- Track shipments.
- Receive ETA notifications when goods are about to arrive.
- Plan ahead for what needs to be done with them once they reach your facility.
Taking action allows for more effective planning, creates an atmosphere of accountability, and improves reliability across the supply chain.
3. Prioritize Compliance
For companies to meet their client’s expectations, complete adherence to supply chain standards is essential. Being mindful of compliance issues will facilitate the smooth running of downstream business processes and allow your company to fulfill commitments quickly.
A robust freight management system can help companies keep up with industry standards and legal or regulatory requirements. It also enables organizations to verify the authenticity of orders and check that all goods meet the necessary specifications. This level of compliance and visibility boosts customer satisfaction and helps protect against any potential harm to a company’s reputation.
Let CloudLogix Help You Manage Inbound Shipments
Now the question is how are you going to execute your action items? It’s time for operational decision-makers to push for a better way of managing inbound freight. That way is CloudLogix — a real-time inbound freight management system designed by buyers and logisticians that centralizes and socializes data for real-time visibility for interested parties.
Our solution integrates with your ERP and any external systems your vendors, suppliers, and carriers use. Our cutting-edge integration provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date data available, allowing them to make faster, better decisions.
CloudLogix can be used internally by your team, externally by buyers, suppliers, and vendors, and other professionals working in supply chains, accounting, production, inventory, and warehouses.
Businesses that implement CloudLogix realize the following benefits:
- Reduced communication waste
- The visibility that allows a company to be proactive in resolving potential delays
- Increased productivity through efficient business processes
- The ability to manage compliance with vendors, suppliers, and carriers through robust reporting of critical data measured against performance metrics
- Cost-effective freight savings through our carrier bid process and our freight auditing tool
When these benefits come together, CloudLogix creates cost savings in all aspects of the supply chain by bringing visibility to the information needed to be agile and resilient. Embrace this pioneering technology, and let us help you take inbound shipment management to the next level.
Contact us today to schedule a demo of our platform. Our team will gladly show you how to use CloudLogix to simplify operations and realize positive growth across your organization.
