Five Things An Online Freight Platform Must Do For Your Business
Technology advances have increased efficiencies in nearly every industry across every sector of the economy. But ocean freight shipping has remained strangely resistant to adopting new technologies, despite the overwhelming evidence of its many benefits.
Now we are beginning to see online technology platforms that meet many of the needs of the industry -- improving workflows and increasing efficiency, leading to increased profits. But not all platforms are created equal. Here are the five indispensable benefits that any ocean freight-shipping platform must provide.
- Provide access to new opportunities - If you’re running a small or mid-sized logistics business, it’s likely that your sales efforts are confined to a specific geographic area. Even with a website and email giving you access to the world, you’re still faced with the task of manually reaching out to clients who are farther away just to grow sales and then manage the transaction. And if you’re running a large freight forwarding enterprise with great infrastructure, do you have to walk away from opportunities just because the cost of winning the business with sales and operations teams is too high? An online platform brings the opportunities to you. This doesn’t replace your sales and marketing efforts, nor does it eliminate the personal relationships that your business is built on. But it does generate new opportunities and transactions at a lower cost from a wider audience than you could ever reach the old-fashioned way.
- Centralize your internal processes - How many quotes do you send just to get an order? How many vendor quotes do you receive just to get a shipment quoted, and then booked and documented? Email makes these processes somewhat faster, but when you have to search your inbox for attachments, scroll through trailing email text, and filter out the unnecessary cc’s, it’s clear that the productivity benefit isn’t very high. A freight platform has the ability to centralize all your quotes, bookings and other shipment details into one dashboard, even if you’re relying on PDF’s and other static file formats. This not only minimizes time wastage, it can also eliminate mistakes that come when numbers are mistyped or language barriers create ambiguity or miscommunication.
- Level the playing field - How much business have you missed out on because you didn’t have the right technology to compete against bigger competitors? A platform business comes with the technology you need to ensure you have a seat at the table. Functions like tracking & tracing, online booking, and rate benchmarking are core pieces of functionality that your business no longer has to go without. For companies with strong in-house technology and strong purchasing power, platforms offer the ability to create new extensions of your business and can even take your business to the next level without having to deploy more expensive proprietary technology.
- Ensure price integrity - A common misconception about selling online is that it creates a “race to the bottom” amongst industry participants. That’s only true when the platform is not truly aligned with the needs of its participants. A freight platform, built specifically for the freight and logistics industry, is designed to respect the market players and ensure that their price offerings properly reflect the overall value they provide to customers, and not to drive down prices.
- Understand your business better: You quote on 100 jobs, which turn into 30 bookings. Not bad. But what happened to the 70 you didn’t get? Was it because of your rate? Or perhaps it was because of your transit time or maybe your team or your vendors took too long to get back to quote and when they finally did, the numbers didn’t work for your customer?
A freight platform provides the analytics and benchmarking data you need to understand your business better. It allows you to measure your service levels against your competitors or your own internal standards. It allows you to figure out which vendors are meeting your standards rather than meeting goals they set for themselves. These features are unique to an online platform and certainly can’t be duplicated by your email inbox.
In a recent survey, Forrester Research reported that 56% of B2B customers expect to make half or more of their business purchases online by 2019. When that day comes, will your business be ready, or will you still be searching your inbox?
Download the free CoLoadX whitepaper, "Logistics as a Service: How it Will Transform Your Ocean Freight Business" and see how LaaS will help your company grow.
By: CoLoadX on Aug. 9, 2017, 9:36 a.m.