Competition drives prices down while rising fuel bills and wage bills drive up costs on the other hand. This scenario is common to all business and applies just as well to the transport sector. In order to stay on top and remain profitable, each business needs to streamline operations to cut costs and maximize resource utilization. Manual operations will never yield these results especially in the case of medium and large-scale transport operators with nationwide or global operations.
Typical Operations of Transport Organizations
The operations of a transport operator involve the following activities:
Booking consignments, preparing manifests, contracting trucks or assigning trucks from their fleet for a particular destination, paper work, dispatch and unloading at destination. This may further extend to pre-arranging a return load. Transport operators have to handle enquiries, process orders and submit bills. They can manually compute freight based on broad assumptions or have a computerized system fine tuned for precise computations and gain a competitive edge.
Allied to this is logistics and warehousing, complaints, tracking consignments, lost or damaged consignments, claims. If they operate on a hub and spoke basis, they would need additional control and monitoring of consignments for such arrangements.
Finance and Accounts takes care of truck hires, billings, delivery, payments, maintenance costs, cheque payments and accounting of each branch along with final accounting
Goods receipt, inventory, on road tracking of consignments, deliveries pending, already delivered, etc.
Customer relationship handling or CRM is integral to transport operations since each customer would need fast, precise information and answers to their queries.
Do it manually or Computerize the Entire Operations?
When you do it manually it involves a great burden on manpower resources with associated costs and with no guarantees of accuracy or precision. This leads to higher overall costs, reduced efficiencies and bottlenecks all of which can eat into already slim margins besides affecting business growth since you are not as competitive as you should be. Transport operators can be in a dilemma. If they burden customers with overheads, they are likely to lose business. If they do not, they face reduced profits or even losses. The best solution is to implement a centralized CRM transportation logistics solution from a known and reliable Retail Software developer with experience in this sector.
The transition to computerizing all operations at one go may present some hiccups. Transport operators may choose to implement IT in the goods booking and logistics section in the first phase. A competent CRM Transportation Logistics solutions provider will be amenable to modular and phased implementation. They can take it to the next level by integrating it with finance and accounting part for still greater control. With these basic options in place, an operator can easily handle customer inquiries, process orders and answer queries about deliveries across the country with just the press of a button. The CRM transportation logistics software has text messaging facilities to keep customers informed and with GPS integration into the fleet, operators as well as customers can track precise locations and give accurate arrival times.
Computerization, in current competitive conditions, is not an option but indispensable and the right software solutions provider is your best partner for implementation, training and support throughout the product lifecycle.
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