There are obviously a lot of negative events going on in the global economy at the moment that will affect manufacturers and transport providers. As consumers spend less, the downstream effects can be large and wide ranging.

Businesses will be more focused than usual on cutting costs and optimising their operations as best they can. This is where supply chain tools will really shine, as they can provide the visibility and control that a business needs to better manage its supply chain costs and activities.

Transportation Management software such as eCargo can help in the leaner times as well as the good:

• Automate the reconciliation of your freight invoices from service providers. By doing so, you'll not only reduce the effort spent on this manually intensive task, but also highlight overcharges and inefficiently rated deliveries. For example, you may have a better full load rate to a certain destination, however when analysing actual movements, you find you're paying the individual pallet rate. Identifying this inefficiency and resolving it through better co-ordination between customer services and dispatch will save you dollars.
• Measure the impact of your supply chain savings initiatives. By comparing year on year freight costs against volumes, you can accurately measure what, if any, impact your supply chain initiatives has on actual freight costs. By comparing freight costs and volumes from the previous and current year, you take away any variations in seasonal movements.
• Use the actual freight costs for the year to better budget for next year's freight costs. eCargo can even help you with modelling predicted freight costs and changes to freight rates.
• Review your freight rates and structures to make sure they still fit your current distribution model. If not - renegotiate freight rates with your service provider to take advantage of better optimisation tools, such as Cube-IQ.
• Make sure your dispatch teams are working as effectively as they can in their execution of freight movements. This may mean centralising dispatch activities by utilising eCargo's ability to manage sites remotely, or providing Customer Services visibility over real time freight movements. This reduces the amount of time dispatch staff spend chasing up customer queries.
• Reduce your capital expenditure through the use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings like eCargo. If credit remains tight, many businesses will look to cut their capital expenditure, which makes eCargo's pay-as-you-go SaaS model highly appealing; this is especially helpful, as it delivers operational cost savings at the same time.

Having more control and visibility over your freight movements and costs will ultimately deliver benefits through costs savings and better utilisation of your existing resources.

Manufacturers and logistics providers around the world have spent millions of dollars investing in ERP systems and other supporting software solutions to help them improve performance of their supply chain. This approach has streamlined processes and centralised information storage and management, yet for the volume of data they create, these systems remain very inward-facing and siloed in their approach to sharing data with other systems and suppliers.

The transportation of goods is a key component of an organisation's supply chain, but one that is predominately executed manually, and 'outside' of an organisation's system.

A Distribution Manager and his staff need to see what is going on: who is doing what, what is most critical and what decisions they need to make. They need a transport management system that delivers 3 key capabilities:

• Visibility across all their freight service providers: from inbound raw materials and stock transfers between sites, to the delivery of finished goods.
• Communication between supply chain partners: automating the communication of freight requirements to service providers and the resulting freight costs.
• Measurement of transportation performance: across any number of keys areas such as supplier responsiveness, freight costs, vehicle utilisation and dispatch performance.

With lack of visibility being the number one barrier to creating a high-performance supply chain, these capabilities combine to deliver a transportation execution system that will contribute towards an organisation achieving their supply chain goals.

eCargo provides these key capabilities through an integrated online freight execution system. Communication and Execution are key components to the eCargo solution, with measurement being delivered through Dashboards, Reporting & Reconciliation.

Please contact us for a demonstration of how eCargo can help you achieve a high-performance supply chain.