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.