Complete visibility and control over procurement transports

Access to comprehensive transport data in procurement is a rarity, even among large industrial and commercial enterprises. And this despite the ready availability of software solutions that can deliver such visibility at the click of a mouse.

Managing procurement processes across multiple production sites often leaves businesses dependent on suppliers or the carriers they hire for information about pickups. The problem is that key data is unavailable or siloed. Order data and shipping data are often not even linked, for example. This then obscures visibility of the transports and prevents cross-location shipment consolidation. The entire process becomes cumbersome, not least because of how many players are involved and how much paper is shuffled around.

The challenge is to gain sovereignty over the entire procurement network so that transport services can be purchased, accessed, monitored, and evaluated across sites. The vision is to have the business organize its own transports, creating a solution that can be used across the board for all carriers and suppliers involved.

Businesses use a specialized order and transport management solution to organize their own procurement transports:

• Order data is transmitted to suppliers
• Suppliers confirm the ordered quantities or partial quantities
• Suppliers add information on shipping units, quantities, dimensions, along with any dangerous goods information and create delivery notes
• All the necessary shipping documents are generated and updated centrally
• Pick-up orders are transmitted via IT interface or web to the contracted carrier
• Automatically route the shipment to the appropriate carrier
• Calculate the delivery date or latest pick-up date based on stored transit timetables
• Shipment tracking on the basis of tracking information reported back by the transport service provider
• Compare target times to actual times, and generate proactive alerts when deviations occur

By marrying order and transport data, businesses gain end-to-end visibility across all pickup processes. The solution makes it possible to monitor processes automatically and provides proactive alerts whenever deviations occur. This eliminates the need to sift through data and allows much faster responses if there’s a snag anywhere.

Freight invoices can be compared more easily with shipping data and projected freight costs, optimizing the invoice auditing process. The result is lower error rates and better management of how a company’s various sites are supplied.

The transport preview lets businesses tap into potential consolidations and bundle pickups from multiple plants, driving down costs. Cross-site reports are just a mouseclick away, yielding insights into supplier performance that leave businesses better equipped for future RFPs.