4 Strategies To Build A Cost-Efficient & Agile Cross-Border Supply Chain

Spot rate fluctuations, inflation, geopolitical crises, skyrocketing customer expectations, and poor visibility challenges disrupt global supply chains, resulting in massive financial losses. 

According to a survey, 85% of companies lose money due to supply chain issues, with 24% of the players losing more than $500K. The main causes are out-of-date integration systems, a lack of end-to-end supply chain visibility, and poor planning and execution. The international shipping community must consider strategies and tools to ensure cost-effectiveness and agility in supply chain operations.

While planning ahead of production schedules and using FCL can help shippers and manufacturers save money, the right technologies can enhance the results of these shipping best practices. Smart international logistics management solutions can help reduce cost leakages and increase shipment agility. Here’s how it works:

Automate Freight Procurement Processes

Manual bidding and freight procurement negotiations, as well as a lack of visibility into current market rates, result in significant cost variances and time waste. Automating freight procurement helps businesses save on freight procurement costs through competitive bidding. 

It reduces freight costs for international shipping through multiple rounds of automated freight negotiations with shipping lines. Businesses can cut freight costs by 12% thanks to automated freight procurement processes.

Address Real-Time Container Tracking Needs

Over 65% of businesses lack complete visibility of their supply chain, resulting in inefficient operations and greater expenses. It also has an impact on the accuracy of the expected delivery time, stymies logistics planning, just-in-time shipping, and, as a result, customer experience. Furthermore, traditional or spreadsheet-based methods take more than seven minutes to track a single container and do not provide real-time status. 

A real-time shipment tracking platform empowers businesses to monitor containers across multiple carriers and freight forwarders using a single dashboard. This completely eliminates the need to visit multiple carrier websites or engage in hundreds of follow-up calls and emails. 

It provides end customers with a robust and real-time container tracking environment and helps improve pickup-related trucking operations by accurately predicting ETAs at ports. A platform like this enables businesses that rely heavily on continuous inventory replenishment to gain critical insights into shipment status and identify areas causing delays. This significantly boosts just-in-time fulfilment planning. 

Leverage Advanced Analytics-Driven Logistics Planning

Several enterprises struggle with a lack of actionable data, adversely impacting the supply chain’s critical aspects like carrier selection, trucking operations, KPI benchmarking, and more. Furthermore, the lack of real-time visibility into incidental costs such as detention and demurrage charges has a significant impact on profit margins. 

Obtaining actionable insights, on the other hand, becomes possible with advanced analytics-driven planning, allowing for more efficient, streamlined, and data-rich operations and agility.  

Analytics-driven logistics management platforms offer automated updates on key shipment milestones. Advanced analytics and reporting aid in business intelligence, which can reduce incidental charges by up to 80%, improve decision-making, and enable seamless stakeholder collaboration.

Automating Critical Logistics Processes

Although digitisation and technology integration has increased in recent years, some processes, such as document generation and collection, accounting, and record-keeping, are still done manually.  Furthermore, using email to communicate with stakeholders can cause delays, increasing total costs.

Automation of commonly used documentation services, such as label generation and label printing, accelerates processes while lowering the risk of errors or order mix-ups. Leveraging smart logistics management platforms can help brands avoid costly and time-consuming errors. Such tools guarantee a 65% reduction in manual ERP data entry and a five-day reduction in plan-to-ship time.

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