Tear Down This Wall! (Pt.1)

You’ve tried everything
You have implemented a sophisticated transportation management system (TMS), established a strategic bidding process to beat market carrier rates, and utilized optimization technologies to find more freight consolidations and shift LTL to Full Truckload.

You have also looked into pooling or cross dock usage, worked with carriers to create loops or continuous moves, and maximized usage of your backhaul; maybe you have even turned yourself into a carrier to fill the remaining empty trucks in your fleet.

After optimizing your logistics in the traditional ways, you are still tasked with finding additional savings. Where do you turn?

Unfortunately, the strategies for savings improvement have gone stale. There have been few, if any, truly game-changing ideas in logistics in years.

Organizations have sought better tools, better people, better leverage, and occasionally been favored by better markets, enabling some incremental year-over-year value. However, the rules of the game in logistics have remained the same:

• Fill the truck
• Avoid empty trailers
• Negotiate the best carrier rates
• Hope the market becomes a little kinder

Fortunately, you don’t just work in Logistics. You work in Inbound Logistics. You can change the rules of the game.

This whitepaper is the first in a three part series that will describe an achievable strategy for inbound logistics organizations to elevate freight savings by 20-30%, through a collaborative, technology-enabled approach to Logistics and Purchasing planning.

The approach is more than a new set of tactics - it is a paradigm shift. It moves away from a traditional model that tends to mimic an outbound logistics program, and instead moves toward one that extracts the full value of inbound freight control.