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Inbound freight management is receiving a lot of attention as businesses continue to look for ways to manage shipping costs.
If you’re looking to save costs on shipping, take a look at inbound shipping. Depending on the industry and size of the company, a business can spend more than 40% of its annual freight budget on inbound shipping, according to the Aberdeen Group, a research firm in Boston. A more efficient inbound freight program can minimize delays, save money and even reduce confusion.
75% of companies surveyed by the Aberdeen Group report that inbound freight management is a key focus point & Total freight spend is between 3.6% and 5.2% of surveyed companies’ total sales, according to Aberdeen’s results. In this all new e-book, shippers will take away an understanding of inbound freight management to reduce costs, increase control, and gain more visibility into the front end of the supply chain function of transportation.
Whether your company is an industrial manufacturer receiving inbound shipments of products to manufacturer your products, a distributor taking shipments of important inventory, or a retailer looking to restock the shelves, inbound freight is a vital part of your business, not just your supply chain.
Yet few businesses take control of the management of their inbound freight. Why? It is complicated, that’s why. It involves multiple departments in your organization that can sometimes be pitted against one another. It involves multiple companies – vendors, carriers, trading partners – and various shipping agreements to analyze and comprehend.
The payoff, however, is still substantial. It is incumbent on the logistics, supply chain, and transportation managers in organizations to champion the cause to get control of inbound freight and make sure the C-level executives in the organization understand the benefits. Hiring an expert partner to help gain control of this complex issue can pay dividends.
The advantages of such a turnkey inbound freight management system are numerous. The best pricing is secured for both at will shipping, as well by applying pre-negotiated carrier contracts to regular inbound shipping. Thorough tracking of all logistics activities provides more informed shipping history when negotiating new contracts.
Logistics expertise in the freight management services provider ensures business rule development and enforcement is performed by professionals able to monitor the processes, execute modifications as exceptions arise, and recommend long-term changes as the shipping environment changes.
Invoice consolidation and visibility into the true costs of inbound shipping enable businesses to implement process changes, if necessary and reduce costs.
Outsourcing both the technological solution and the logistics expertise eases the burden on internal shipping organizations, as well as IT staff. A service empowered by a TMS solution is fast and inexpensive to deploy, requires no new hardware or software, and provides access to users company-wide depending on role.
Improving visibility, controlling processes, and better cost management through a managed service empowered by an effective inbound logistics program, through both technology and integrated services, reduces costs and improves operations.
Inbound freight management and logistics are receiving a lot of attention as shippers continue to look for ways to manage and mitigate freight costs. Traditional transportation management system (or TMS) vendors help with logistics planning but do little to address what happens in the day-to-day execution. The problem is complex and logistics expertise, as well as software systems, are important to reign in the escalating costs and inefficiencies. It’s important if currently utilizing or looking to hire an outsourced logistics company, that the company offers integrated services, alongside their technology systems, to help you set up a robust inbound logistics program.
Inbound freight accounts for between 40-80% of total freight spend and 75% of companies surveyed by the Aberdeen Group report that inbound freight management is a key focus point. Total freight spend is between 3.6% and 5.2% of surveyed companies’ total sales, according to Aberdeen’s results.
To get a handle on costs, businesses say they need increased visibility into shipments and orders, more control of inbound shipping processes, and increased collaboration with carriers and suppliers. Existing processes are inconsistent at best – real-time freight tracking and tracing are unavailable, plan optimization and routing rules are often not followed by suppliers; cost information is difficult to obtain, and current manual systems don’t scale well with growth. Unfortunately, 90% of shipping executives surveyed said that their current systems, including their Transportation Management Systems (TMS), are inadequate for addressing their inbound shipping needs.
Real Time Freight Rates: To combat rising transportation costs the application must make it easy for users around the country to execute policies that deliver immediate freight savings. Today, that means the application must be built with state-of-the-art web services architecture, in order to receive live carrier rates over the Internet. No more theoretical savings, but hard ROI based on live, vendor-neutral access to real-time market rates.A combination of inbound freight management software and expert integrated managed services provides an ideal solution to the complexities of inbound freight shipments where suppliers are a big factor in the cost-reduction effort. Partnering with a proven, reliable third party logistics company, who also has the ability to deliver both the system and the services is an ideal way to ensure the entire shipping process is effectively managed.
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