If you run any sort of business that has product to dispatch to customers; this is a topic that should interest you. Should your business be resale rather than manufacture to sell; then the topic should be doubly interesting – to both the procurement and the marketing sides of your enterprise.
Input & Output
Even a company that makes everything it sells has to purchase raw materials which have to be shipped in; turned into product and then shipped out to customers. The reseller is even more reliant on his incoming shipments since his business is to them turn around and ship them to someone else.
Who To Choose For The Physical Act Of Carrying Your Goods?
Whether it is items coming to you or your finished items being shipped out to your customers; somebody has to arrange the transportation. Your Logistics Department starts the ball rolling but, you do not own a worldwide fleet of transportation vehicles and airplanes. Therefore, you need to appoint people to perform the physical act of moving things from point “A” to point “B”.
Both your suppliers and your customers may have their own preferred companies for freight forwarding, transportation, customs clearance and freight receiving. Furthermore, their preferences will usually be based on firm economic grounds; as would be the case for any carriage contracts that your company might place.
What would be the point in demanding that your favorite carrier be given a monopoly on work destined for or originating from you; if that should then backfired on you with surcharges caused by not using the supplier’s favorite method? Or, it takes 14 days for your appointee to complete the delivery; whereas the supplier’s contractor can do it in 8 days? This can be very relevant if the routing is from one country to another.
Tying Up All Loose Ends
Probably, you will end up having a number of carriers that you use on a regular basis; each of these will have their own demands in matters like packaging, labeling and documentation. For your efficiency, you have installed shipping management software into your IT systems; but, if that software was designed to slot in with one particular carriage organization; it might not function well with a different carrier. For maximum benefit, your software must be compliant with Multi Carrier Shipping Systems.
