When discussing generating transportation savings in the current environment, Gartner analyst Farrah Salim agreed with what we have been saying: “All trucks and containers [should] hold as much capacity as possible. If achieving a full load is impossible, consider collaborative distribution.” She also recommended matching inbound and outbound movements. But doing these things is not that easy…as commonly used tools don’t support:
- Load optimization – that is why we built AutoO2 to maximize payload
- Coordinating inbound and outbound loads – most systems don’t understand the need to sequence operations, so unloads happen before the empty trailer is needed. We have a tool for that too… AutoScheduler
- Determining who pays what amount of the transportation costs when collaborating on distribution. This one is tricky – some 3PLs take this as a major margin contributor. Shippers need a calculation based on the binding constraint (cube, weight, or pallets), which can change from load to load.
Guess what, we can help there too!