What is the Role of Transport Within the Supply Chain?
Of the processes within your supply chain, few have as significant an impact on the efficiency of your operations as transportation. It’s an integral part of the supply chain that plays a key role in building and maintaining your firm’s reputation. Good transportation can mean the difference between enhanced customer satisfaction and canceled orders.
As such, effective transportation management is often the primary competitive differentiator between companies. It determines how fast your customers get their orders and, to a greater extent, how much they pay for them.
GETTING THE RIGHT PRODUCT TO THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME
From a logistics viewpoint, transportation is not merely a means of moving goods from one location to another. It’s a means of facilitating all other major operations within a supply chain. The role of transportation is to increase the efficiency of your operations by getting raw materials, intermediate products and finished goods from their point of origin to their destination.
Here’s how transport services link all elements of the supply chain.
1. TRANSPORTATION ALLOWS FOR BETTER INVENTORY FLOW
Effective transportation management keeps your inventory lean, thereby making the flow of stock through your warehouses much more smooth and efficient. Enhancing the flow of goods in and out of your warehouse can help you reduce costs on storage and transportation while reducing overall lead time.
2. TRANSPORTATION ENHANCES CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Making sure finished products reach a customer on time and in the condition they were shipped in is an essential aspect of transportation management. Transportation is one of the few processes in a supply chain where companies have direct interaction with the customers. As such, ensuring quick and reliable delivery while taking measures to avoid delays can increase customer satisfaction and establish your brand’s reputation as reliable and trustworthy.
3. TRANSPORTATION IS USED TO BYPASS GEOGRAPHICAL BARRIERS
One way for businesses to grow is to expand their reach globally. Last-mile delivery is a crucial element of logistics and supply chain management because it plays such a critical role in keeping customers happy. Yet, it’s incredibly difficult to get it right due to infrastructural and geographical barriers. Trucks have, for a long time, been the preferred mode of transportation on land. They can get to remote areas and traverse terrains other modes of transportation can’t.
Transportation makes goods available to consumers no matter where they are. The success of your supply chain depends on the strategic use of an appropriate transportation system. However, it’s important to optimize transport routes to keep costs at a minimum. A growing risk in the transportation field is the decline of roadways and other transportation infrastructure.
4. TRANSPORTATION IS USED TO SEGMENT SHIPMENTS BASED ON PRIORITY
Every shipment will have varying degrees of priority depending on the customers, products, and time of year, among other factors. Sometimes, getting certain, high-demand packages delivered more quickly is preferable to having all packages delivered at a moderate rate. Consequently, the modes and routes of transportation must be segmented to reflect these complex realities.
Additionally, various modes of transportation are required for a truly effective transportation system. It often takes a combination of different modes for a product to reach an end-user or distributor.
TRANSPORTATION MANAGEMENT WITH DATASCOPE WMS
Customer service has become the basis on which companies drive business growth and profitability. To meet growing consumer demands, businesses have to expedite order fulfillment and find a way to ship goods via the most timely, reliable, and cost-effective mode of transportation. Unfortunately, transportation tends to be an expensive, complicated process for most companies, which is why a transportation management system (TMS) is a must-have for supply chains in every industry.
A TMS provides visibility into your day-to-day transportation operations to ensure the timely delivery of freight and goods. Freight and fuel costs make up a considerable portion of any business’s logistics budget. Fortunately, software solutions like DATASCOPE WMS provide the extra bit of transparency distributors desire. DATASCOPE’s cloud-based WMS contains modules for load planning, shipping, and receiving, in addition to the TMS module, all of which add up to offer broader insight into your overall transport ecosystem.
A full-scale freight audit with a technology-based application like DATASCOPE WMS can help you keep transportation costs to a minimum by identifying redundancies, tracking driver efficiency and analyzing overall transportation performance. To take advantage of our unique solution and start driving your business to new heights, get in touch with us to schedule your demo!