Plan, procure, execute, & track transportation for every shipment across your supply chain & logistics operations
A SaaS solution to help grow your business by achieving 100% perfect order execution at high volumes
Increase vehicle capacity utilization and customer promise adherence
Grow your business with omnichannel presence and automated pickups
Consolidate shipments for hub to hub movement across land and air
Real-time customer communications and collect accurate PODs
Orchestrate logistics operations with multiple 3rd party carriers
Achieve cost effective, scalable, sustainable, and customer centric deliveries
Orchestrate all your cross-border logistics operations with ease
Improve address accuracy, ensure first-attempt delivery success, reduce costs and boost customer experience
Gain end-to-end shipment visibility, get proactive alerts, and send customers live tracking links
Grow business in a dynamic world and manage operations across First, Middle & Last mile
Delight customers by seamlessly managing store and online orders across own fleet and 3rd party
Reduce freight costs & get end to end visibility across shipments
The game of delivering delightful and impactful customer experiences has come a long way from doorstep deliveries and order tracking. The fact that customers “can get” same-day or few-hour deliveries has driven a huge paradigm shift in the entire parcel delivery segment. Businesses are going above and beyond to move goods faster across multiple channels and offer flexible delivery services, and multi-courier partnerships are key enablers in all these initiatives.
Multi-courier partnerships are definitely going to increase in the coming years, given the business benefits they offer and the rapid pace at which customer demands are evolving. However, they bring in a set of management disruptions that set operational efficiencies and profitability askew. The inability to manage multiple partners from a single interface and maintain visibility, efficiency, and transparency across multiple parties can affect the bottom lines and lead to critical losses. Here, we discuss five major pitfalls that every business needs to avoid while working with multiple couriers.
Manual order allocation is prone to inefficient and inequitable distribution of workload among multiple parties because it is highly subjective across management personnel. Planning the most optimal order allocation workflows such that multiple business constraints for delivery ETAs, vehicle capacity utilization, consignment characteristics, etc., is an extremely complex process.
Manual allocation can not only increase transportation costs, but it also limits the businesses from leveraging the unique strengths of different carriers in a multi-courier ecosystem. Businesses are unable to rank or prioritize couriers based on complex cumulative criteria such as rates, delivery location, serviceability, etc. Ultimately, this amounts to higher operational costs, inefficient transportation, ETA SLA breaches, and more.
Every courier partner offers a management interface to the businesses for operational purposes and as a part of their managed IT capabilities. However, this way, businesses end up with siloed management systems that fail to offer cumulative insights across all the partners. They are unable to check and compare multi-courier partners for serviceability, SLA adherence, profitability, and more.
This becomes particularly limiting in case a shipment is traveling via multiple service providers across the first, middle, and last mile. Businesses have to do everything individually, right from shipment booking to tracking and invoicing to feedback collection. Hence, the entire ecosystem can easily become a breeding ground for confusion, chaos, and inefficiencies.
Multi-courier management with legacy systems suffers from many pain points, and the inability to have unified performance benchmarking is one of them. Being unable to get insights and carrier data from all multi-courier service providers in one place makes it impossible for businesses to put cumulative KPI benchmarks and performance metrics in place. They are unable to compare partners and rank them based on their performance, delivery success rates, customer feedback, compliance adherence, etc.
This affects the overall performance management in the multi-courier ecosystem, and businesses are unable to make strategic decisions for process improvements. Such siloed management spurs inefficiencies and fuel cost bleeds, amounting to critical business challenges.
The success of multi-courier partnerships depends on the ability of a business to identify and choose the right partner for every order keeping multiple business and delivery objectives in mind. This requires a careful analysis and comparison of different partners for rates, serviceability, location constraints, and past performance.
Not having a centralized multi-courier management system can lead to biased or poor choices of courier partners, amounting to higher operational costs, poor asset utilization, and more. Hence, it is absolutely essential that businesses compare their courier partners in terms of service offerings, quotes, individual strengths, and delivery constraints to ensure highly profitable operations.
Field operations data, such as the number of timely deliveries, failed deliveries, empty miles, number of packages delivered per trip, etc., are crucial for strategic process improvements. If businesses are unable to gather these insights from multiple partners and process them to visualize trends or patterns related to business operations, it is highly likely for them to kick-start a downward spiral of events.
They might not be able to find out the hidden optimization pockets, the various ways they can optimize their asset use to increase the deliveries per trip, reduce fuel costs, reduce vehicle leasing costs, etc. Businesses might also struggle with identifying ways to counter silent business killers, like empty miles, idling, etc., as such things easily go unnoticed.
This is where intelligent multi-courier management platforms prove consequential. They come with in-built carrier management functionalities powered by intelligent algorithms that help businesses specify constraints and rules for carrier selection, vehicle selection, offer smart routing, and more. Managers can digitize documentation, automate billing and invoicing, reduce costs per delivery per trip, and leverage in-built capabilities to unlock greater levels of customer satisfaction.
Shipsy’s multi-courier management platform offers indent management, real-time tracking, carrier evaluation via KPI benchmarking, and prioritization based on past performances. Hence, businesses can actually plan trips for shipments that are yet to arrive at the consolidation center and ensure highly efficient hub-to-hub and hub-to-customer movements to unlock:
To know more or to check our intelligent management platform in action, please schedule a personalized demo here.
Investments in courier partnerships need to be justified based on their flexibility, service quality, ROI in terms of customer service, ability to deliver on the agreed promises and more.
The global CEP industry is expected to be USD 519.6 Billion by 2027. As the market grows, so do the fulfillment requirements. Read how intelligent multi-courier management can be a game changer.
