This article was contributed by ProShip, a key Reveel partner specializing in multi-carrier shipping software solutions.
The holiday season is a time for bringing joy and cheer through your brand’s store and shipping operations. Ensuring timely delivery is essential during peak season, navigating carrier pricing complexities, partnering with carriers for capacity and order throughput is challenging. With critical planning early in the year mixed with the right tools in your Supply Chain Software stack, navigating peak season can be smoother and more profitable than ever before.
Understanding Peak Shipping Season Challenges
As carriers scale to keep up with increased demand, shipping expenses rise no matter the speed of carrier service your brand chooses to ship with. This year, more than ever, can negatively impact your bottom line while trying to maintain customer satisfaction as planned expenditures. These challenges include:
- Skyrocketing Shipping Costs: Carrier implemented surcharges targeting peak season volumes coupled with General Rate Increases (GRIs) have significantly increased shipping costs.
- Increased Competition for Capacity: Large volume throughputs intensify competition for carrier capacity, making it even more challenging for operations to fulfill a customer’s promise delivery dates.
- Service Disruptions: Delays, missed deliveries, and package damage can occur more frequently during peak seasons, making this time of year even more important to have the right visibility tools.
Understanding these underlying factors, you can implement strategies to mitigate their impact on your business.
How to Protect Your Supply Chain
The tools to take control of your peak operations are available today and assembling the correct tools for the desired outcome in your operations can enable and maintain your brand’s competitive edge.
- Leverage Multi-Carrier Shipping Software
A robust multi-carrier shipping software solution and multi-carrier strategy is a must. To effectively manage your shipping operations, consider a multi-carrier shipping software solution that offers advanced features like:
- Extensive Carrier Network: Access a wide range of national, regional, same-day, final mile and international carriers within the platform
- Flexible Deployment Options: Deploy the solution in your infrastructure of choice (your cloud or vendor’s cloud) while the system scales to handle your volumes without compromising performance
- Versionless Architecture: Adapt to changing carrier regulations with ease and avoid downtime with automatic updates.
- Versatile Integration Capabilities: Integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, such as WMS, OMS, and ERP, to streamline operations and eliminate manual effort.
- Intelligent Carrier Optimization: Leverage advanced tools to optimize carrier selection based on cost, delivery speed, customer attributes and more. Syncing multi-carrier optimization with other business logic improves efficiency while reducing costs.
- Tracking and Visibility: Tracking shipments allows you to monitor, provide timely updates to customers, intervene on a package proactively and measure performance
- Leverage Parcel Spend Management
Implementing a parcel spend management solution enables your brand to effectively measure cost impacts and act to mitigate supply chain challenges.
By analyzing shipping data in real-time and identifying cost-saving opportunities, you can uncover hidden costs, such as unnecessary shipping charges or inefficient carrier selection. You can make data-driven decisions to continuously improve the way your brand selects the most cost-effective carrier for each shipment. Additionally, you can use your shipping data to more effectively work with your carriers during contract negotiations.
A robust parcel spend management solution can offer advanced features to help you achieve your shipping goals with your carriers:
- Advanced Analytics and Reporting: Gain deep insights into your shipping data to identify trends, optimize your shipping strategy, and uncover cost-saving opportunities.
- Contract Management and Compliance: Ensure compliance with carrier contracts and identify opportunities to optimize your agreement to fit your business..
- Proactive Spend Management: Utilize AI-powered tools to predict potential cost increases and proactively take steps to mitigate their impact.
- Seamless Integration with Shipping Software: Receive near real-time data from your multi-carrier shipping software to combine valuable datasets seamlessly
Optimizing for Peak Season Success
As the holiday season is in full swing, it’s crucial to have a robust shipping strategy in place to navigate the challenges of increased volume, rising costs, and carrier capacity constraints. By leveraging these tools together, you optimize your shipping operations, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction. A well-executed shipping strategy with the right technology can make the difference between a successful and stressful holiday season.
Learn more about ProShip’s industry-leading shipping software solutions by scheduling a discovery call today and diving into your unique parcel shipping challenges.
About ProShip
ProShip, the industry-leading multi-carrier shipping software solution, allows high-volume enterprise shippers to automate carrier service optimization (rate shopping), and easily build and manage complex business rules all within one carrier-agnostic system. ProShip seamlessly integrates with your existing WMS, OMS, ERP systems, and other automation processes, scaling as your business grows. With both on-platform and private cloud hosting deployment options, ProShip empowers enterprise shippers to streamline complex workflows, maintain carrier compliance, decrease IT dependency through continuous updates, and find a quick ROI. Trusted by leading brands, ProShip is the last shipping software you’ll ever need. Visit www.proshipinc.com to learn more.
