Simply worded, the one point objective and agenda of any Freight and Logistics Management system is “the designated goods at the right place at the right time at the right price”. These two terms are complementary to each other; while Logistics may deal with everything related to movement and storage of goods, freight management specializes in planning, tracking, and controlling the transportation of goods.
While the Logistics part has its own challenges, one of the main challenges for any Freight Management system is communication. This challenge has become a common hurdle as the two systems are complementary in meeting the business objective. Whether the organizations grapple with these systems deal with 2PL or 3PL or 4PL type of logistics and no matter what types of solutions adopted, the challenge of communication has always been significant and sometimes formidable.
The aspect of communication can unfold into multiple challenges that can bring headaches to any transportation organization. The challenges related to communication make it a far too complicated story considering multiple types of goods and multiple modes of transportation; to keep the discussion relatively simple, this article focuses particularly on the road transportation and shipment related challenges.
List of Challenges
The Communication challenge in the case of Freight Management arises because of the need to keep track of many aspects throughout the process of transportation.
The Challenge of “Paper” Work: Depending on the goods in the consignments and the routes to be covered, a slew of paperwork may require. Certifications of compliance, pro forma invoices, dispatch notes, clearances, permits, and many such others may have to move along with the consignments. Not just the goods but the papers have to be right for the designated goods!
Wrong papers could cause many problems in transportation, misplaced consignments, delayed shipments, held-up drivers-vehicles, and legal issues just to quote a few. Ensuring the right paperwork is important, as record-keeping is one major challenge for the Freight management industry, no matter what kind of logistics is involved. Ensuring the right details are carried by every driver is important as also doing so in minimal time.
While the “paperwork” is important, the question that should be asked “is the paper important?” In this modern age when the world is moving rapidly towards the concept of Industry 4.0, papers may simply turn out to be just the environmental problems!
In another argument, it can be said that from the lean point of view, while efforts spent on providing details about goods and the details about the sender, transporter, and receiver of goods is important, all other efforts could be treated as process waste. But then the challenge is how to ensure providing the right details about the goods, the sender, and the recipient?
The Challenge of Scheduling and Tracking Trips: Optimizing freight loads and trips is an important aspect of Freight management. Making efforts to keep the costs and efforts as optimal as possible is necessary to achieve minimum time and competitive billing to the customers.
Trip Scheduling is about lining up transportation activities based on the completed and future trips to be made based on the plan. Scheduling the trips is important for ensuring optimal costs and minimum transportation time. Often shipment of goods is done in consignments that may combine multiple destinations and modes. It is thus also necessary to communicate the schedule so that logistics planners are allowed to plan the shipments from the starting point to the destinations.
While it is important to schedule trips it also becomes important to track the trips and more importantly keep the status information up-to-date. Tracking allows to not only keep a track of the trips and consignments in them but also offers the ability to provide timely information to the customers.
Route tracking is one of the essential steps in Route optimization which ensures that the vehicles travel through to the destination by the usage of a combination of rules concerning the cost of transportation as well as time taken to find the optimal best for these two. Traffic condition information may be made available for the planner as well as the driver in order to optimize the time and cost.
Planning, scheduling, and tracking are important aspects to ensure actions taken for deviations and contingencies are initiated in time. With the increasing vehicles worldwide, it’s not only important to track vehicles but also to do so in near real-time. The use of technologies like GPS becomes important in these aspects.
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