Navigating Multiple Transport Vendors for Quicker Delivery, Superior Customer Experience, and Better Cost-Efficiency

In today’s fast-paced world, logistics management has become an essential part of retail operations. To ensure the timely and efficient delivery of goods to customers, retailers need to have a reliable and cost-effective logistics system in place. Aside from owned fleet vehicles and 3PLs, a business’ logistics network can rely on a contracted fleet of freight vehicles provided by transportation vendors.  

However, in many regions, especially in South and South-East Asia, the market for rented delivery vehicles is highly fragmented and disorganized. This creates a significant challenge for retailers who have to deal with multiple vendors offering a range of services, prices, and vehicle types individually, with no unified process of engagement or tracking. This fragmentation makes it difficult for retailers to identify the best vendors and negotiate prices, leading to increased costs, delays, and inefficiencies.

Working With Multiple Transport Vendors – Challenges

The biggest challenge in dealing with multiple vendors is the lack of standardization and transparency in pricing. There are different prices and availability times for the same vehicle type depending on the vendor, location, and time of year. This makes it difficult for retailers to determine which vendor to use, resulting in a lot of time being spent negotiating and comparing prices. Some vendors can even have hidden costs, such as insurance or fuel surcharges, that can inflate the final price of the delivery.

Furthermore, dealing with multiple vendors individually can be a time-consuming and inefficient process. Retailers need to negotiate contracts, track pricing, and manage delivery schedules with each vendor separately. This can lead to communication breakdowns, delays, and errors in delivery.

Navigating Challenges in Multiple Transport Vendor Ecosystem With Automation

To address these challenges, retailers need a transport management system that can help them manage multiple vendors, standardize pricing, and provide a unified process for managing logistics operations. Such a system can help retailers optimize their logistics operations, reduce costs, and improve delivery times.

A transport management system can standardize pricing by calculating prices from different vendors based on market vehicle requirements. This can help retailers compare prices from different vendors accurately, ensuring that they are getting the best possible price for each delivery. Moreover, the system can automatically raise and manage requests for market vehicles, ensuring that retailers can quickly requisition market vehicles with the lowest costs and utilize a greater proportion of the capacity of hired vehicles.

A transport management system can also provide a unified process for managing logistics operations. For example, the system can digitize contracts, reducing the time and effort required to manage contracts manually. The system can also provide a centralized process for managing multiple vendors, reducing the time and effort required to contact vendors individually. Moreover, the system can provide a tracking dashboard, making it easier to manage multiple deliveries from different vendors.

Another benefit of using a delivery management system is that it can improve the overall customer experience. By providing real-time tracking and delivery updates, retailers can keep their customers informed about the status of their deliveries. This can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to increased sales and revenue.

How Can Shipsy Help?

Shipsy offers a SaaS transport management solution to retailers to help them optimize, automate, track, and simplify their logistics operations. Among its capabilities is ‘Vendor & Indent Management’, which allows retailers to digitize their contracts, calculate prices from different vendors based on market-hired vehicle requirements, and automatically raise and manage requests for market vehicles through a vendor portal or through E-mail and SMS contact, ensuring that the retailer can quickly and easily requisition market vehicles with the lowest costs and utilizing a greater proportion of the capacity of hired vehicles.

By utilizing a delivery management system, such as Shipsy’s solution, retailers can optimize, automate, track, and simplify their logistics operations. The solution helps retailers to make the process of dealing with multiple vendors simpler and more efficient, reducing overall costs and increasing the speed of delivery. Retailers can leverage the system to improve the efficiency and transparency of their logistics operations, which can help them improve customer satisfaction and retain customers.

To summarize, the market for delivery vehicles on rent is highly fragmented and disorganized, especially in South and South-East Asia. Dealing with each vendor individually, is extremely challenging and leads to higher costs. To address these challenges, retailers need a delivery management system that streamlines the entire process and provides real-time visibility into delivery operations. 

Shipsy’s Vendor & Indent Management solution is an example of such a system, providing retailers with a unified dashboard for managing all delivery operations, reducing communication breakdowns and errors in delivery, and significantly reducing costs. By using a delivery management system like Shipsy, retailers can improve the efficiency of their delivery operations, reduce costs, and improve the overall customer experience.