How freight forwarders can use the summer effectively

Periods of low business are a good opportunity to make improvements and optimise internal operations. We present 4 business areas that forwarders can optimise over the summer months to make their work processes more effective and best prepare for the increasing number of orders in September.

Business slowdown over the summer months

Even though some dispatchers have to deal with additional workload in the summer, experience shows that the absolute volume of orders decreases in the middle of the year. The holiday season takes out the pace of economic activities, so that companies scale down their production. For forwarding managers and general managers, this phase offers optimal conditions and additional capacities to push strategic as well as tactical considerations.

1. Time for consultations

Long time of working in the same job often leads managers to overlooking the potential for improvement in their company’s internal processes or not being able to tackle them due to a lack of resources and capacities. External consulting can make it possible to carry out promising process optimisations within a very short time and to gain new perspectives for business development. The summer moths with lower amount of orders is the ideal time for this.

The following consultations are recommended:

• General consulting: What new tools (e.g. technologies, business practices and business models) are spreading on the market?
• ROI consultation: How profitably can the new technologies be used in one’s own company?
• Business plan: How can new tools be anchored in the corporate strategy and implemented practically?

2. Time for comprehensive reporting for business analysis

Consultancies are most promising when they can draw on well-founded data. Operational business usually has priority, so reporting is often neglected in day-to-day business. This is particularly damaging to business because reporting provides important strategic insights into one’s own business processes. Only through structured data preparation can haulage companies draw added value from the collected data.

The following data, among others, can be collected through comprehensive reporting:

• Performance of one’s own company
• Current market prices
• Logistics costs
• Performance of the carriers

3. Time for the implementation of new technology solutions

With the analysis of one’s own company and the new tools, however, the most difficult part only begins. The new tools and features have to be integrated into the existing process landscape in the company and in most cases this involves an enormous financial and time effort. Since the capacities for implementation are limited in a normal order situation, many companies do not even tackle it or simply neglect it. Yet advanced technology solutions offer a multitude of benefits for freight forwarders. They enable faster transport allocation, easier carrier management, effective communication, streamlined work processes, reduced workload and new integration possibilities with other data sources.

These are some of the technology solutions carriers can invest in this summer:

• TMS
• Telematics systems
• Transport Platforms & Private Freight Exchanges

4. Time for staff training

Those who use new technologies must also train their staff or allocate time resources for short training sessions. Your own staff must know how to use the tools and be able to use all the functions fully. The summer months provide the ideal conditions to conduct training sessions. This provides the operational staff with new tools for the increasing number of orders at the end of the summer, so that the orders can be handled quickly.

Staff should be trained so that they

• understand the core functions that lead to a faster transport allocation,
• can achieve better utilisation of the carriers,
• work better with other branches,
• can achieve higher productivity and profit for their own company,
• can use strategic data to analyse the work of their partners and their own team

Book a free consultation now – improve ROI with the private freight exchange

Don’t waste time and use the summer months to prepare your freight forwarding company for the next months with increased order volumes. We offer you a free consultation for this purpose. In it, we show you how you can improve your ROI with digital tools. Using real business data – individually tailored to your company – we provide a realistic business forecast. Find out which cost and time savings you can achieve with our new tool for effective carrier management and fast transport allocation and how you can integrate this solution into your company’s processes.

Book your meeting for the free consultation right here:

Marcin Ostrowski
West Sales Team Leader UK, Benelux, France, Nordic & Turkey
Tel: +31 858883351
mail: mostrowski@trans.eu
Book a meeting: https://calendly.com/mostrowski/30min