Fast-Tracking Food Supply Chain Operations with Technology
The food supply chain faces daily challenges, ranging from product shortages to transportation bottlenecks and delivery delays. Addressing these logistical hurdles is a race against the clock.
Whether it’s managing the shipping lifecycle or meeting retailer requirements – handling these obstacles in-house can be difficult to manage, slowing down urgent tasks such as reworking loads or filling last-minute orders.
The time-sensitive food industry underlines the importance of automating daily tasks and gaining greater visibility into your freight’s entire journey to create more efficient processes.
According to Thought Spot, “With supply chain data analytics, companies can monitor and analyze [the supply chain’s] complex structures, adjusting processes and operations to optimize the supply and demand relationship with high-quality, on-time, and lean production.”
Minor Workflow Inefficiencies Cause a Bigger Impact than Leaders Realize
The pressure to meet retailer requirements such as on-time in-full (OTIF) and must arrive by date (MABD) adds an extra layer of urgency for food shippers to get everything right the first time.
Manual Processes Create Pressure
Many logistics departments still manually process all of the data that comes with managing shipments, including building, reworking, and tracking, which consumes valuable time and resources for already busy teams.
Manual calculations on short lead times leave those in the warehouse that are responsible for shipping in a time crunch, placing too much pressure on a few people to find the best combination of shipments that fill the whole truck, avert wasted space and prevent unnecessary trips.
And Pressure Leads to Errors
Manual planning also creates more room for human error to occur; simple mistakes in calculating and entering the wrong weight, dimension, density, and volume of packages lead to costly charges from carriers. Plus, the limited visibility that comes from working in a silo prevents employees from finding money-saving solutions such as combining multiple LTL shipments into one truck.
How Technology Can Help
Investing in better organization tools, like a transportation management system (TMS), gives you the real-time data you need to effectively build loads, meet tight delivery deadlines, and automate daily tasks to yield significant time savings.
Transportation teams that work in house at a food manufacturing or distributing company typically have access to cost-saving data but it’s rarely in a format that allows them to take action.
With a full-service TMS, logistics teams can not only become more efficient shippers but also quickly and easily analyze shipping data to save even more time and make even more intelligent shipping decisions.
The Savings is Clear
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Spending ~10 min per load each day following up with Carriers | Spending <1 min per load each day checking XTMS for status |
| Spending ~30 min reworking a load at the last minute | Spending <3 min reworking a load in XTMS at the last minute |
| Spending 2+ hours compiling data from multiple places to build a report for your COO | Spending <3 min downloading a real-time report for your COO |
| Spending ~15 min per load manually entering order information into your shipping spreadsheet or other system | Spending 0 time to get your orders automatically in XTMS (integration) |
Time is Money
With extra time from automating operations, logistics leaders can put more energy behind upselling opportunities, whether it’s maximizing pallet space or adding complementary products, seizing rare chances to boost revenue and customer satisfaction.
How DLX Became the Food & Meat Shipping Experts
Food shipping insights don’t have to stop here! If you’ve enjoyed this article, head over to our Meat Shipping Experts page to learn more about how we’ve helped some of the nation’s leading food companies streamline their operations and save on shipping.
Automate Your Processes with XTMS
Doing more in less time helps keep the food industry moving forward. Integrating a TMS into your processes streamlines operations and resolves your challenges related to manual data entry, transportation headaches, and multiple loads, all while ensuring your food products arrive damage-free and on-time for retailers.
Ready to take the next step towards efficiency and cost-savings? Reach out to our XTMS experts at Dynamic Logistix to schedule a free demo.
