Opinion piece by Leopard Systems Managing Director, Alex Koumaras.
For Postal and T&L businesses, freight visibility is seeing and understanding every action and transaction connected to moving freight; accurately pinpointing every customer’s shipment throughout the delivery process—from initial order placement to the end-consumer receiving the freight.
As more and more customers demand exceptional delivery services, the mobile technologies that provide greater freight visibility are proving invaluable to transport operations. In fact, enterprise mobility software operated via rugged mobile computers, smartphones, hand-held devices and vehicle telematics systems offer a strong technology network for freight and business visibility.
With comprehensive freight visibility, your transport business will:
- KEEP CUSTOMERS INFORMED
Customer service levels go up when real-time visibility of a shipment’s location is available and communicated to your customers. Providing up-to-the-minute freight information, such as its current GPS location and predicted arrival time, puts your customers at ease because the exact status of their delivery is known to them.
A speedy delivery, whilst ideal, isn’t as important to the customer as knowing the arrival time and receiving clear notifications that it’s on time or that the ETA has changed. Accessible visibility data also relieves your customer service agents of managing frustrated customers concerned about where their deliveries are.
- KEEP FREIGHT MOVING
For many operations, the convoluted sequence of activities to deliver freight creates opportunities for errors to creep in. However, when visibility-enabling technology is in the hands of many active users and connects numerous arms of your organisation, the depth of information generated becomes powerful.
Both real-time and historical data from a mobile technology can provide a clear picture of freight operations to determine the best way to eliminate costly bottlenecks and minimise lag times. Freight visibility is paramount to making effective decisions and providing reliable customer service.
- FIX PROBLEMS FASTER
Supply chain visibility enables operations to identify potential upstream and downstream risks to active shipments – from manufacturers and wholesalers to shippers and retailers – that could affect the delivery process. Delivery management software allows organisations to obtain data and critically analyse what happened before, during and after a specific event or issue occurred. With deeper insights from freight monitoring data, your transport company can be proactive about streamlining your delivery processes, rather than only reacting when there’s a problem.
The transport organisations that use mobility data to improve their performance continually will ultimately be the ones that provide the greatest customer service and delivery speeds.
- FIND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
The collaboration of visibility data can improve productivity and revenue for multiple stakeholders in a supply chain. For instance, haulage companies who know where their trucks are, where they’re going and how much space is available on them – could win new business and use their trucks more efficiently when sharing this information with ready customers. Mobile technologies that capture freight status information enable data mining for further insights. Also, up-to-date performance information and accumulated confidence levels for on-time deliveries help customers choose the better freight company based on real data.
Freight visibility allows transport operators to provide highly efficient deliveries. By retrieving data at multiple ‘hops’ along the delivery process, such as at a sorting facility, on a regional carrier, and to a last-mile delivery provider – a mobile technology solution for visibility is integral to every one of those steps.
In closing, modern transport companies are under pressure to deliver freight in shorter timeframes and at lower costs. Without detailed freight visibility, this task of achievng this in the eyes of the customer is near to impossible. Contact Leopard Systems for more information about delivery management software and other delivery solutions to increase your freight visibility.
