Control Transport Spending While Improving Service

Latest release of CarrierNetOnline opens door to real time collaboration

There has never been a greater need to manage freight transportation spending and costs while at the same time increasing efficiency and service. Not only are the logistics companies suffering – the users are also going through hard times with rising energy and other costs.

In a market situation like this, there will be no welcome mat for logistics service providers coming and asking for increased prices to compensate for their rising costs. However, the company that offers reduced prices, tied into increased service and visibility will be more than welcome!

Piyush Shah, the CEO of Deltion (www.deltion.co.uk) , providers of award winning CarrierNetOnline (CNO) believes that the latest version of CNO has the answer – and without the need for significant up-front investment.

“Shippers and their customers are all required to cut their overall costs. But many logistics companies are saying 'We can't contribute to these cost reductions, our cost increases won't allow it', Mr Shah said. “But it is not difficult to get transport costs under control, or to improve service at the same time. And you do not need to make big investments”.

The latest version of CNO not only contains all of the tools necessary for sub-contractor and in-house transport cost control and service management, it also provides innovative features to allow enhanced visibility and collaboration.

One of the surprising developments in the use of the Internet is that fact that many major advances for business solutions have followed consumer technologies. The next big move is business based 'social networking', developed for supply chain partners and this is now one of the CNO latest offerings. “Companies can have visibility of their transactions across the extended supply chain, and they will be able to collaborate on-line to jointly manage events as they occur. This is a dramatic leap in customer service – and at low cost. The concept is similar to those of Facebook and MySpace” Mr Shah says.

A key advanced feature is the ability to set up customer defined KPIs – not just for in-house operations but also for all subcontractors. “This means that users can establish a best-practice benchmark across all of their operations and use these benchmarks to drive down costs and improve service. The KPIs are then a key factor for sub-contractor contract renewal and for in-house improvements” said Mr. Shah.

The real time nature of CNO means that you have event management and control at all times, costs are driven down and service levels are up. Sophisticated routing and scheduling features – both manual and automatic – allow dynamic, real time scheduling and alerts can be sent to customers and consignees if delays and other problems occur on route.

CNO is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and, apart from the major business benefits of real time supply chain event management, offer very significant financial benefits. There is no capital expenditure involved, because the services are available on a pay-as-you-use or subscription basis; there are no ongoing or hidden charges for upgrades and maintenance; there is seamless integration with legacy systems; and they are more tax efficient. The usual problem of buying over-capacity in business software does not exist: the service provider makes additional capacity available – and only charges for it as and when it is needed