1. Be customer centric and bring them value

You need to go further for your customers, they should not be inconvenienced by your company’s transportation strategy. Products should be delivered to a customer based on their needs, not when it fits in with you schedule. Your schedule needs to be built around the customer.

Take time to fully understand your customer, how they operate, what they expect and build your transport strategy around these key points. Meet your customers expectations whilst streamlining your own logistics operations in the process.

2. Measure performance; build relationships

As a transportation partner you should be positioning your company and service as a transactional partner, rather than a strategic partner. Building trust-based relationships with clients using your transportation service, based on willingness to collaborate, working as one team and cross function thinking, is an essential ingredient for a strong working relationship.

The use of KPIs and metrics to measure the effectiveness of these collaborations encourages ongoing improvements form both sides. Building long-tern relationships with stable, dependable and committed carriers is a very effective way to ensure a high-quality service is given to your partner organisations. It may be beneficial to access the services of a legal team, such as that of Langer & Langer, who can assist in drafting contracts for this type of working relationship.

3. Stamp out transportation waste

Transportation is often used as a strategic differentiator, with great importance placed upon the notion that most transportation is necessary and by no means wasteful. However, transportation becomes wasteful when there is unnecessary journey points and distances covered due to an inefficient logistics system.

You need to focus on how you could differentiate your service in the industry by using route optimisation software coupled with a lean approach to carriage. Waste comes in the form of any distance travelled that didn’t need to be, and importantly this includes distance of certain items within a consignment that travel more distance than they should due to bad route planning for multiple item consignments.

4. Get to grips with the cost structures of transportation

Productivity costs and unit costs are the two major considerations for logistics companies, each with their quirks when it comes to how you can be more cost efficient. Most logistics providers have learned that instabilities in the transportation network are often a by-product of paying too much attention to unit costs and carrier rates.

The real savings lie in the optimisation of productivity costs using trucking route software to monitor how trailers are used, the total of miles driven, standing and in transit times of vehicles and the optimisation of routes overall. This way shippers will feel they have value for money, being less likely to quibble over other costs and time taken – the results will be obvious.

5. Daily event management is essential for agile logistics

Money is saved from a disciplined approach to your daily event management. As mentioned, waste is a key factor and should be monitored on an hourly basis and efforts to reduce this waste should be second nature.

Daily transportation plans, route designs, real-time track & trace, real-time metrics and agile real-time problem solving is the only approach any logistics operation should take, with specific attention given to discipline in all your processes – again, supported by software.

About the author

David Bailey-Lauring is a single father of three boys and a content writer and regularly writes about sport, fitness, education and tech in the UK, USA, and Europe.