Improve Transportation to Meet New Supply Chain Realities

According to a new report from Aberdeen Group, “New Strategies for Transportation Management,” those treating “transportation management as a critical platform for information sharing and activity synchronization within the company and across suppliers and customers” are achieving a clear edge over competitors.

Technology is perceived as an enabler of improved transportation procedures by nearly a third of the companies surveyed for the study. About 30% expect to implement new applications in the next year-and-a-half while most already using transportation management systems will be extending them in the same time period.

Here, as cited by Aberdeen, are four recommendations covered in the study:

1. Prioritize transportation improvement initiatives through the lens of the customer.

2. Extend transportation management processes to deliver value to other parts of the organization, such as customer service, replenishment and procurement.

3. Identify root causes of service failures and cost overruns by using scorecards and analytics to examine carrier performance and internal and trading partner processes.

4. Create a program to become more carrier friendly to buffer themselves from capacity shortages and rate hikes.

The study of manufacturers, distributors and retailers found that best-in-class companies have been able to reduce the costs for transportation as a percentage of sales by 2 to 3%. Those surveyed are broken into three levels – laggards, industry norm and best-in-class.

Learn more and download a copy of the report at http://www.aberdeen.com/