Digitization has revolutionized all segments of the freight industry. Freight businesses can leverage digitization to transform their existing processes, adopt new initiatives, adapt to an innovative culture, and improve customer experiences. With the challenges plaguing the freight industry due to the pandemic, digitization is not just an addition to your work processes but an absolute necessity. In a time when organizations are dealing with inefficiencies and errors due to manual processes and documentation, digitization is the best way to stay ahead in the face of competition. Statistics suggest that organizations will spend around $2.3 trillion on digitization by 2023. Here are some of the most notable benefits of digitization in the freight industry:
1. Increased Efficiency and Productivity
Digitizing your freight and logistics processes means eliminating tedious paperwork, manual entry processes, and data entries; instead, your workforce can focus their efforts on essential, higher value-add tasks and projects. With digitization, you improve the productivity and efficiency of your workforce while lowering your overall expenses. Another benefit of digitization is employee satisfaction. Employees can focus more on customer-centric aspects of their jobs rather than wasting their time and efforts doing tedious tasks. They will find more meaning in their work and inculcate a corporate work culture that embraces technology, much as they do in their personal lives.
2. Improved Supply Chain Transparency
With digitization, data that used to take days to collect is available on-demand. Digitization eliminates the latencies and the resultant discrepancies and errors in data collection and organization. Besides making data more real-time, organized, and easier to manage, digitization allows you to trust your data set better. These make the supply chain more transparent and provide better, actionable insights.
3. Interoperability
Digitization allows companies to streamline data flowing through the work processes and provide valuable insights to improve the company’s efficiency. The global network of interoperability between different stakeholders relies on digitization and data usage. Interoperability refers to the free and active exchange of information between all involved parties. This feature makes the logistics industry more efficient, sustainable and transparent. Allowing end-to-end visibility, new interoperable systems capture efficiencies that weren’t possible before.
4. Time and Cost Efficiency
Time is a valuable commodity everywhere, and more so in the freight industry. Every process must be timed so that there is on-time delivery of materials without disrupting the supply chain. Delay in delivery often leads to extra expenses like demurrage and detention charges and, if the parts are critical to the customer, excessive expedite costs. Complex operations in the sea freight supply chain can be automated through digitization. Back-office automation for sending emails, alerts, or getting other paperwork done optimizes human resources while saving time and costs.
5. Better Customer Experience
A stellar customer experience is key to a successful freight business. In this context, real-time tracking of the package helps customers be aware of any possible delays and narrows down the arrival time window. This leads to happier customers with reduced call-ins to customer service centers. Another benefit of such end-to-end visibility is route optimization (dynamic routing). Since the data is being shared continuously, optimizing the route and preventing unnecessary delays becomes easy. On-time delivery, and receiving regular updates about routes, and time of arrival, improve customers’ satisfaction.
6. Optimizing Internal Operations
The freight industry relies on complex interactions between different stakeholders spread across multiple geographies. Frequently, parts of this complex chain lack robust back-office operations and this distorts the real-time visibility across the entire chain. And the high competition among logistics providers increases pressure for all the companies in the market to optimize their costs, time, and operations. Digitization and supply chain transparency become competitive tools in this environment. Thus, digitization is the only way forward for such companies.
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