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
Directly Jump To
Logistics management is one of the main driving forces that keeps any product-based business up and running. As long as the logistics and supply chains are managed in an efficient manner, the businesses can beat their competition and grow at a steady rate. Research has shown that nearly 79% of all companies with efficient logistics and supply chains experienced a higher-than-average revenue growth rate.
However, managing logistics is challenging, and the recent global logistics and supply chain breakdown proves this point. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, exposed the latent inefficiencies within the system. Businesses need effective logistics management systems that can streamline logistics operations while reducing overall management costs.
In this blog, we will learn more about logistics management systems, its features, business applications, and how the latest trends help evolve modern logistics management software.
A logistics management system is a platform that simplifies logistics operations, both forward and reverse, by making access to vital information easier and refining the overall production cycle. It helps organizations manage different procedures in their logistics operations and production cycles, from procurement of raw materials to delivering the final product to the right customers as per determined timelines.
The logistics management system comprises various key components, and the most crucial ones are shared below:
Real-time visibility is one of the most prominent features of modern logistics management software. It allows the relevant stakeholders to see the status of every shipment, asset, vehicle, and other such logistical components in real time.
This way, the managers can get real-time information on every process in the supply chain, helping them make accurate decisions regarding production, inventory, and delivery.
Transportation management capabilities allow companies to plan and optimize the transportation of final products from their manufacturing units to warehouses (first mile), warehouse to warehouse/hub/distribution center (middle mile), and ultimately to customer doorstep (last mile).
With LMS, fleet managers can plan efficient delivery routes, allocate packages to the right drivers, make delivery operations faster, and minimize the overall cost. It can also help the relevant stakeholders predict which delivery routes will take the shortest time.
With demand forecasting capabilities, a logistics management system can predict and optimize inventories and product supply, depending on the increase or decrease in demand.
The software analyzes the product lifecycle using historical sales data to identify trends and forecast demands in the near future. With this feature, LMS can help companies avoid too little inventory or overstocking situations.
Another crucial feature of logistics management software is managing inventory movements. Businesses can track active orders, re-order supplies, and monitor shipments using real-time sales data. It can also process the orders, organize them, and fulfill the orders automatically as they show up.
This will save organizations a lot of time and capital and reduce the risk of errors by identifying potential frauds.
Software for logistics management allows the organization and the relevant stakeholders to monitor activities in the warehouse in near-real-time. Businesses can use sensors, IoT devices, and intelligent storage tools to manage the warehouses and keep track of all the warehouse inventory records with minimal manual intervention.
It leads to faster shipping, better order fulfillment, lower warehouse management costs, and improved product tracking.
Better supply chain management ensures increased profitability, sustainability, and improved customer experience. LMS gives businesses increased supply chain visibility, helping them manage and improve every step of the supply chain, from collecting raw materials to manufacturing the final products to delivering the finished goods.
With this, logistics management systems can help companies find better suppliers, and optimal sourcing locations, quantify the right sourcing amount, and meet the demands of the end customers and clients.
Next, we explore the list of the top 10 business benefits of using logistics management systems.
Transportation is one of the most important factors in logistics management. It involves fuel charges, energy, labor costs, and shipping fees. With a logistic management system, businesses can optimize transportation to simplify it and reduce the overall costs related to it.
Plus, it uses historical data to make relevant decisions like driver allocations and automatic dispatch to maximize transportation efficiency while keeping the expense on the lower side.
Smart logistics management solutions, like Shipsy, come with in-built AI algorithms that help businesses orchestrate highly efficient and timely deliveries via granular optimization. Advanced functionalities, such as route planning and optimization, vehicle capacity management, and rider optimization, reduce the miles traveled as well as the time taken to complete the deliveries.
With LMS, businesses can optimize their delivery fleets and timing to deliver the shipments faster to the end customer. The software helps organizations speed up their production cycle and choose the right carriers. This leads to a decrease in shipping delays, making the delivery process more reliable.
Logistics management software can automatically analyze different shipping services, transportation methods, and delivery agents to help businesses find the most efficient and affordable solutions. Businesses can automate tasks and workflows, leverage smart optimization algorithms, and gain granular visibility into people, processes, and orders to maximize the number of orders per trip and reduce the miles traveled. Thus, the operational and delivery costs get reduced, and businesses are able to secure highly competitive contracts and can trap inefficiencies to unlock better revenues.
The LMS analyzes all available assets and optimizes their use to increase supply chain efficiency, boost the production cycle, and reduce overall operational costs by a considerable margin. This way, all of the business assets will be used wisely, which is yet another reason for the reduction of operational costs.
Smart solutions also allow businesses to set specific rules/constraints for asset optimization, which means even better control over processes, operations, and people.
Logistics management software systems automate core processes and workflows to minimize human errors in any organization effectively. Manually working on repetitive tasks and analyzing huge chunks of data can be quite time-consuming and tiring, which, more often than not, leads to numerous human errors.
LMS uses AI-powered, intelligent algorithms that can automatically process huge chunks of data and automate repetitive tasks. It can further use the analyzed data to provide crucial actionable data insights with minimal delays and no errors for better business decision-making.
Automation of the overall logistics and supply chain workflow is one of the biggest benefits of logistics management software. It automates several logistics functions like route planning, driver allocation, supply chain task allocation, load planning, and much more.
On top of that, these applications also eliminate the need for paperwork, speeding up the logistics operations for faster completion.
Logistics management software can seamlessly integrate across all business software like ERP, cloud, and other data management systems. With this, the software can access multiple data points, such as historical delivery, logistics, and supply chain data, which it can analyze to provide better operational visibility, automation, route planning, and improved insights to increase customer satisfaction.
Managing multiple carriers and tracking shipments manually by extracting data from several carrier websites is tedious and unproductive. LMS can automatically import the carrier data and their past performance to manage multiple carriers, allocate the right shipments to them, monitor them in real time, and more.
This way, businesses can gain better customer satisfaction, reduce shipping costs, and improve delivery efficiency.
With a smart order management feature, LMS provides businesses with the smart capabilities and functionalities to fulfill deliveries, validate them, and authenticate them once the shipments reach the end customer.
Advanced software for logistics management ensures delivery authentication via OTPs, customer calls, messages, etc., and also offers validation checks for delivery failure reasons authentication via PoDs that can be uploaded in the system.
All of them can be done in a span of seconds, making it easier to eliminate fraudulent orders and transactions.
No matter how well a business plans its deliveries, some shipments are bound to return to the inventory for various reasons. Modern logistics management systems offer smart RTO and NDR management in case of non-deliveries in the most efficient way possible.
This allows organizations to save money on delivery re-attempts while the business can take corrective measures to deliver the failed shipments successfully.
The logistics industry has changed a lot, especially after the coronavirus pandemic. While businesses and professionals are spreading buzzwords about many trends, not all of them are noteworthy. Here are five key trends that are redefining logistics management systems.
IoT sensors and devices helped many companies improve their logistics operations by providing end-to-end visibility to the supply chain stages.
With IoT device integration, the relevant stakeholders get more transparency over various logistics operations like fleet management, conditional monitoring, warehousing, and storage of goods. As a result, businesses can enjoy better operational efficiency and make informed decisions to deal with supply chain disruptions faster.
Many logistics management systems use artificial intelligence to identify data patterns and customer churn insights. AI allows the LMS to help companies with route optimization, better route planning, budget planning, intelligent transportation, demand forecasting, etc.
Al-powered logistics management software can use real-time forecasting and behavioral coaching to increase the efficiency of logistics operations while reducing cost.
With warehouse automation, LMS can minimize human intervention and streamline warehouse management to increase task efficiency and fulfillment speed and reduce operational costs. It can automate many manual processes like procurement, distribution, and customer service.
The popularity of IoT devices and AI has greatly influenced the predictive maintenance of the supply chain and logistics industry. Many business leaders started employing predictive analytics to adjust inventory levels, stock the warehouses, forecast demands, and greatly improve chain transportation.
Smart data and logistics management using predictive analytics will transform the supply chain industry and how we manage business logistics in the upcoming years.
It’s a decentralized technology that can securely record transactions among multiple parties. Blockchain technology can make audits more transparent, making detecting any attempt at fraudulent transactions easier.
Future logistics management systems can use blockchain to build trust and protect online transactions with additional layers of security.
With Shipsy’s AI-powered, end-to-end logistics management systems, businesses can optimize, automate, track, and simplify their logistics and supply chain operations.
This future-ready logistics management system can seamlessly connect with almost all data management solutions to provide real-time shipment and logistics operation visibility from a single, intuitive, and data-rich dashboard.
With a network of 20,000+ shippers and hundreds of 3PL companies, Shipsy helped its clients achieve the following:
Request a customized demo today to see how Shipsy’s AI-enabled logistics management platform can help businesses overcome logistics and supply chain challenges.
Explore the critical elements of strategic logistics planning & how they can help businesses unlock operational excellence and cost efficiency. Also, find the top 10 strategies for logistics planning.
This blog offers an exhaustive and thorough industry-wise & business-use case-wise break-up of different logistics software solutions and some compelling industry insights for all types of businesses.
