The shipping industry is around 60 odd years now and in recent years had seen massive changes in terms of operating model. Over the years this industry was operated over emails, fax, and paper manifest and the response time from freight agents was more than weeks.
Today with the easy availability of information (Thanks to technology )consumers can easily find out details about their shipments. Due to modernize technology almost every industry is going digital whether its payments, procurement, retail or many more, then why freight & logistics is still a black box industry.
Digital Logistics is hard to crack
International freight is complex. There are uncountable people involved in each shipment coordinating over multiple channels of communication; According to a research conducted by Maersk, it’s estimated that an average of 200 interactions from 30 people in shipping a single shipment.
Visibility of a shipment is limited and as lowest as possible by far in any industry and this results to struggle in providing real-time reports.
Thousands of truckers, airlines, and liners have different formats for pricing and a set of confusing fees and surcharges with multiple pricing systems makes a typical door-to-door quote full of over 20 line items. Over that these line items change multiple times for same nature of shipments which results in confusion for end users in order to finalize on freight agents. As per Dr. Zvi Schreiber, founder Freightos,
Lack of standardization isn’t a new problem but more agile supply chains certainly are.
Unimproved customer service
Traditionally customer service in this industry means a single point of contact in the company who takes care of all the issues raised by clients and making sure in delivering a better experience to shippers. But according to sources, Nearly 75 percent of all forwarders believe that customer service in freight is shifting towards high automation with the personal touch, Just like what we do with personal banking.
Things are changing and, similarly, changes from digital transparency will not be confined to just prices.
As shippers gain transparency in services levels , and even reviews or ratings, forwarders anticipate that customer service will become a more important factor in provider selection,
eroding price’s role as the all-powerful decision driver. — says Mr.Terry Donohoe, President of Sherwood Global Logistics.
Offline billing and Documentation
In the Logistics and Distribution sector, management of transport documents, such as bills of lading, delivery notes, etc., presents numerous challenges, including management of enormous amounts of documents, large administrative processes and badly organized storage of documents.
According to IATA, an individual air shipment can require up to 30 paper documents, meaning there are about 7,800 tons of paper documents created each year. Eleven years since eAWB’s launch, industry penetration is still below the 50 percent mark. I was amazed to see a major airline where someone has the job of trolling physical airway bills from one side of the office to another- says Founder, Freightos.
Due to decentralized documentation and continuous change in information during shipment execution, it becomes a task for the finance department to analyze the details and prepare bills. In logistics, its quite rare for an invoice to exactly match the original price quote.
For instance, after the quote finalized by the parties fuel charge may increase, or currency may fluctuate or many a times seller provide incorrect dimensions and weight etc results fluctuation in pricing. Such increase in incidences results in massive billing errors. Freight invoice auditing — which annually corrects an estimated $684 million of errors (as per sources)
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Boxnbiz is a Saas Enabled freight forwarding and customs brokerage company Simplifying global trade through modernize Shipping technology. Our mission is to make the user experience in global trade better and help the community to trade anywhere from world through single click of button.
