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There’s been a lot of buzz in recent years around the role emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, and blockchain will play in supply chain management. Indeed, CTSI-Global is part of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance. And, while these innovations will likely become more prominent over the next decade, only a small percentage of shippers currently have or even need these capabilities. At the same time, some of the supply chain technology that’s readily available right now can be a real game-changer.

What supply chain technology has the biggest impact right now?

For most shippers, there are a few key pieces of logistics software that can take operations to the next level. Though each company’s needs are different, these typically include a transportation management system, freight audit and payment services, a warehouse management tool, and supply chain analytics.

Tools like these might not seem as glamorous or exciting as something like AI or blockchain—but implemented properly, they form the foundations of an effective supply chain. Combined, they provide the visibility and efficiency shippers need to keep their operations humming along smoothly.

For example, moving from clunky, manual order management and carrier selection processes to a system that automates some of the most time-consuming steps can save shippers literally thousands of hours of staff time each year. Take the TMS tracking feature alone—the ability to instantly check on the status of a shipment lets shippers answer customers’ questions and stay in the loop about potential delays without having to dig out the carrier’s number and hope they pick up the phone. And when a shipper’s TMS is cloud-based, it provides the flexibility for employees to perform crucial work from anywhere, which has proven an essential capability in recent months.

With these crucial building blocks in place, shippers can start to think about experimenting with emerging tech. But without having foundational tools in place, they may as well be trying to fly before they can walk.

How do these tools help shippers stay ahead of the competition?

Staying one step ahead of the competition doesn’t mean rushing to adopt an expensive piece of tech that hasn’t been fully tried and tested yet. It means utilizing the right tools at the right time—and getting the greatest return on investment from them.

Just look at tools that provide real-time visibility into a company’s shipping data. These can deliver instant ROI by allowing shippers to rapidly hone in on unnecessary expenses, such as excessive premium freight spend, so they can put money back in the bottom line. Using their TMS dashboard, shippers can keep one eye on their metrics at all times, ensuring no problem slips under the radar and no opportunity to save goes unexplored.

Continuously striving to tighten efficiency and bring costs down is what gives shippers a competitive advantage. Modern supply chain technology makes this possible, paving the way for leaner, more effective operations—and greater profitability.

Cutting edge, but not pie in the sky

CTSI-Global’s leading-edge logistics technology is designed to give companies an edge—and help them continuously improve.

Our tools are not white-labeled software that won’t deliver on its promise, nor are they futuristic gadgets that you’ll never use. We built our software ourselves with the real and present needs of shippers in mind, informed by our team’s decades of experience in the logistics world. And we’re constantly working to make them even better, so our clients can stay ahead of the curve.

Unlock your competitive advantage. Contact us today.

While expanding into new territories can create lucrative opportunities for companies, many are unprepared for the obstacle course that lies ahead of them when their logistics operations start spanning borders. Managing global logistics operations requires an entirely different skillset—and mindset—than handling domestic needs. And with regions like Europe, Asia, and Latin America presenting wildly different challenges, the obstacle course only becomes more daunting the bigger a shipper’s operations get.

Here are just a few of the obstacles that shippers must be prepared to conquer—and how international logistics consulting services can help.

Leaping over language barriers

Language barriers can create a range of complications for shippers entering new regions.

The most obvious place this presents itself is in communicating and building relationships with carriers and customers. If you don’t speak the language fluently, it’s very hard to negotiate and discuss terms effectively, let alone build the trust necessary for an effective long-term partnership.

The solution is not as simple as having a few bilingual team members on staff. In Europe alone, there are 24 official languages—though more than 200 are spoken throughout the continent. In Asia, you can add another zero to the end of that number.

Experienced international consultants can not only help shippers bridge the language gap but can provide a nuanced understanding of local business customs. This can go a long way toward giving new clients confidence in a shipper’s abilities, even if that shipper is brand new to the region.

Navigating customs complexity

Shippers can run into all manner of customs issues if they’re unfamiliar with different regions’ customs clearance processes. Since delays and problems at the border can lead to dissatisfied customers and hefty fines, this is one aspect of global logistics that requires particular care and attention.

It’s vital that companies possess a thorough understanding of the different taxes and duties they’ll have to pay and the various paperwork they’ll require to get their goods cleared and moving again in an efficient fashion. Being aware of potential challenges—like outdated clearance practices and mountains of red tape at specific borders—can also be hugely beneficial, allowing shippers to plan accordingly to mitigate potential delays.

An international consultant can provide these insights and help to streamline the import and export process. While in-house staff might have to try and make sense of different regions’ clearance processes from clunky government websites, top consultants often have first-hand experience dealing with local requirements, making their guidance invaluable.

Keeping pace with ever-evolving regulations

Ensuring regulatory compliance in global logistics is an uphill battle—because the regulations are always changing. This requires shippers to dedicate a not-insignificant portion of their time to stay on top of what’s changing and how they can remain in compliance—unless they have someone to steer them in the right direction.

Take Brexit. Even if shippers are fairly comfortable with and confident about moving goods in and out of Europe at the moment, the lack of an agreed-upon Brexit trade offer means its impossible to know exactly how regulations will change between now and the end of the year, when the transition period officially ends. Unless someone on staff is carefully keeping up with Brexit trade news and how upcoming regulatory changes will impact their operations, companies may wake up in a whole new regulatory world come January 1, 2021.

International consultants are dedicated to following new and evolving regulations and passing this information on to their clients. This ensures companies are always in the know about what regulations they need to adhere to, preventing a compliance headache down the line.

Simplifying the global logistics obstacle course

Navigating the global logistics obstacle course isn’t easy. Working with an international consultant takes many of the biggest challenges off shippers’ plates—making it easier to break into any region they set their sights on.

At CTSI-Global, we’re strategically placed to help shippers manage customs issues, regulatory concerns, and more. We own and operate facilities on three continents, so our knowledge of different regions isn’t anecdotal—it comes from decades of first-hand experience.

Overcome every obstacle. Learn more about our international consulting services by contacting us today.

Freight auditing is an essential element of a healthy supply chain. Without conducting freight audits on an ongoing basis, it’s impossible for shippers to know exactly what they’re spending—and whether they’re overpaying.

While it is possible to audit your freight bills in-house, handling this process manually leaves a lot of room for error. Freight auditing can be a time-consuming and tedious process and one which places an unnecessary burden on a company’s already busy accounting team. When that team is tasked with sifting through hundreds or even thousands of invoices every day on top of their other work, it’s inevitable that mistakes will slip through the cracks.

When mistakes go unnoticed, they quickly add up.

The majority of invoicing errors aren’t the result of malicious intent, but of simple human error. Unfortunately, that same human error can creep in during a manual audit—and even the smallest mistakes quickly add up.

Say a shipper has negotiated a discount with one carrier that impacts all freight of a certain class—but someone on the carrier’s end forgets to apply the discount when they bill. If the person auditing on the shipper’s end isn’t aware of or has forgotten about the agreed-upon discount, the undiscounted invoice will be processed and paid, potentially costing the shipper hundreds of dollars more than it expected to pay.

Now let’s say the carrier has forgotten to apply that discount to multiple—or even all—of the applicable shipments. If the auditor didn’t realize a discount had been missed the first time, they’re unlikely to spot it on subsequent invoices. As a result, the shipper is no longer just paying a few hundred dollars more than it has to—it’s overpaying a few hundred dollars time and time again.

This is just one example of an avoidable and costly mistake that’s all too easy to miss during manual auditing. Between base rate discrepancies, duplicated invoices, improperly classified freight, and incorrectly billed accessorial charges, small mistakes can rapidly add up to steep costs when they go unnoticed.

Look at it this way: even if only one in every hundred invoices contains an error and only one error in every ten goes undetected, that still amounts to extra dollars being subtracted unnecessarily from the bottom line.

Minimize errors by making the manual audit a thing of the past

These days, manual auditing just isn’t necessary. Modern freight audit technology can not only review thousands of freight invoices in a fraction of the time it would take a person but can catch countless errors that the human eye might gloss over.

Since digital solutions also automate the data capture process, gaining a complete and accurate picture of global freight spend is significantly easier. This allows shippers to perform regular freight spend analyses, establish baselines, and make smarter, data-driven decisions moving forward. When staff are entering the data required to perform this kind of analysis manually, there’s a high chance that a number will be entered incorrectly or vital details will be left incomplete, which can skew the results and lower the quality of insights extracted from the data.

Get your freight audit right, every time.

CTSI-Global’s world-class multi-modal freight audit solution makes it easy to manage spend, handle accrual reporting, and put money back in the bottom line. Our solution automatically audits all freight invoices—both domestic and international, and across all modes and carriers—and processes refunds for exceptions in a timely fashion. And since we develop our tools ourselves, we’re able to accommodate a wide variety of custom coding requirements and allocate costs by any criteria.

Getting the freight audit process wrong can be costly. Ensure you’re never paying more than you need to by contacting us today.

Even modest-sized supply chains generate vast amounts of data. But when it comes to analyzing all that rich supply chain data for insights, most companies are only scratching the surface.

Here are a few of the most common reasons why shippers’ data efforts fall short—and how they can take things to the next level.

Data is spread across multiple systems, so gaining a global picture is challenging.

At global companies, it’s not uncommon for different regions to use entirely different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and freight payment providers. This can create barriers to visibility for supply chain leaders, who may have to manually gather, synthesize, and standardize data from across dozens of systems before they can even begin to analyze it—otherwise, they’ll only ever be getting half the story.

Using a tool like our transportation management system (TMS) can eliminate this problem. By creating a centralized hub through which all data flows, our TMS makes it easy for supply chain managers to quickly access accurate and up-to-date global data for analysis and comparison purposes.

The built-in business intelligence tools also go beyond simple dashboards alone, empowering managers to drill-down into their key performance indicators (KPIs) for more information whenever they need it. This allows them to compare metrics like cost-per-line across multiple product lines at both a regional and global scale, all on one intuitive platform.

There are too many fires to put out elsewhere, so data doesn’t get the attention it deserves

Having cutting-edge data tools is only useful if you have the time to use them. And unfortunately, at many companies, time is a rare commodity.

We see this a lot. Companies tend to approach data analytics with a lot of excitement and optimism out of the gate. But if you follow up with them a year or even six months down the line, few are utilizing their data tools to their full advantage, claiming there’ve been too busy putting out fires elsewhere in the business.

The truth is, fires will always crop up, so if companies find they don’t have time for data analytics now, they’re unlikely to discover more time moving forward. That leaves them with two options: truly commit to analyzing their supply chain data in-house by designating a large-enough portion of an employee’s time solely for analysis—or lean on outside help.

At CTSI-Global, we fulfill that analytical role for many of our clients as part of our customized logistics management bundles, creating detailed reports built around a company’s KPIs. This not only allows supply chain managers to focus on putting out fires without distraction, but it can also provide insights into looming problem areas—enabling them to extinguish sparks before they can ignite.

The team lacks a “power user” who knows the business and its data inside out.

Even when businesses do designate time for data analytics, their efforts can be held back by a lack of expertise.

Companies that thrive at data analytics generally have a “power user” on staff—someone with a deep knowledge of and passion for data analytics combined with an inside-out understanding of the business. Since this person understands how to work with data and knows what they should be looking for, they’re able to rapidly spot things like efficiency bottlenecks and cost-saving opportunities that a layman is likely to miss.

Hiring an in-house data analyst might not be possible for some companies. Luckily, this is another area in which outsourced logistics management can be both beneficial and cost-effective. At CTSI-Global, for example, our expert analysts take the time to really get to know our clients’ businesses, allowing them to essentially augment a company’s own staff and operate with the nuance of a power user.

Since we work with hundreds of companies across every sector, our analysts can also compare clients’ data to industry-wide trends. This is data that companies wouldn’t have access to on their own—and the insights and recommendations that come from it can provide a serious competitive advantage.

Take a deep dive into your supply chain data.

CTSI-Global’s industry-leading data tools and services empower companies to go deeper than the surface level—so they can uncover the wealth of insights that their data holds.

We take data very seriously, which is why we also gather, analyze, and act on feedback from our customers on an ongoing basis to ensure our tools not only meet their expectations but surpass them.

Most companies aren’t getting the most value from their supply chain data. Be the exception.

Contact us today.