Initiating smart transportation

As digital experiences and trends go mainstream, transportation and logistics companies will need to invest or deepen their investment in relevant technology areas. However, many 3PL vendors continue to deal with manual data entry while everything else in their lives has gone digital. Compounding the challenges are driver shortages, the increase of data from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, and the rise of emerging geographic markets with antiquated paper-based systems. Transportation companies cannot delay advancing their digital journeys without losing their business to more transient and volatile competition such as Google’s same-day delivery, Amazon’s drone package delivery, self-driving trucks, and the inevitable Uber for Trucking.

There are four areas where digital initiatives will have an immediate impact.

Leveraging innovative technology to improve customer experience

Customer engagement applications are now an integral part of our daily life and can unlock exponential growth for the transportation industry. When tightly integrated into backend systems of record (SOR) they become strategic tools for enhancing experiences in customer onboarding, trace and tracking, omnichannel invoice validation and processing. By deploying applications for planning routes, tracing schedule or delivering information in real-time, transport companies can improve customer engagement and boost revenue.

Guide your digital journey

If you have invested in your digital initiatives, you probably expect your ROI in the form of speed of execution and agility to reduce existing business latencies and inefficiencies. However, documents like bills of lading, customs declarations, claims documents, proof of delivery, driver logs, catering and fuel receipts, carrier invoices and expenses still drive and support most 3PL business processes. Drawing on the use of the latest document processing technologies like Intelligent Capture, as well as increasing efficiency through cloud-based solutions, are essential to the success of digitization of transport. Even if a relatively small percentage of logistic data is still locked in paper, it slows down the workflow process. Repetitive and mundane tasks like scanning, tracking and tracing or monitoring shipment schedules, invoicing validation and credit collections can complicate the digital efforts and drive away customers.

Improve Workflow Transparency

Having a digitized and efficient workflow will provide customers transparency into the logistics process, so they have feedback into how their transactions are progressing and what, if any, additional documentation is required to move the process forward.  Users want to feel like they are in control of the process.

However, to have a dynamic workflow, intelligent capture is needed to automate the process of classifying document types. Auto-classification of document types into classes and subclasses delivers a tremendous business value. It reduces the cognitive tasks and burden on workers, thereby minimizing errors and operational labor costs, improving worker satisfaction and accelerating the transaction.

Gain Context from Data

Real-time data can be a competitive game changer for 3PL practitioners. It facilitates and accelerates the decision-making process on carrier selection, load optimization, centralized track and trace, and claims management. Management of costs and visibility are important to your customers as well.  Armed with metadata, your customers have granular visibility into shipment and on-time delivery validations, duplicate billings, and more.

Digital transformation in needed in the transportation industry to evolve your organization, enhance the customer engagement experience and drive more revenue. Click to learn more.