Optimizing Upstream Transport Booking and Effectively Managing Risks
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Optimizing upstream transport booking and effectively managing these risks are key challenges for companies aiming for an agile and reliable supply chain.
Many companies continue to face a "black box" effect in their supply chain supervision, particularly at the transport booking level. In this article, we review the limitations of a manual and fragmented transport booking process and the benefits of implementing Winddle for collaborative management of your transport bookings between your Transport/Supply Chain teams, suppliers, and forwarders.
Crucial Lack of Visibility on Transport Bookings
More than 70% of Import teams in the Retail and Industry sectors do not have direct visibility into the details of transport booking requests submitted by their suppliers to their forwarders. These requests are typically made either via email or directly on each forwarder’s web portal by the suppliers. This leads to tedious and error-prone email exchanges: the shipper follows up with the supplier to verify that the booking request has been submitted, the forwarder queries the shipper about the validity of the booking request received from the supplier (delivery dates, quantities, volumes, etc.), and so on. Once the booking request is validated, ensuring the effective delivery of the goods by the supplier involves further quality validation, timely document transmission (packing list, transport invoice, product certificates, etc.), and potential container, truck, or plane consolidation adjustments. Without a consolidated and shared view with suppliers and forwarders, these adjustments become cumbersome and a source of confusion.
Such back-and-forth emails, difficult-to-maintain Excel follow-ups, and data entry errors result in significant time loss, lack of transport plan optimization, and associated transport overcosts (explicit or otherwise).
Collaborative Management of Your Transport Bookings
To simplify and secure the organization of your transport flows, the key challenge is sharing reliable and structured information among the stakeholders in this phase of your supply chain, namely your suppliers, Import/Transport team, and forwarders.
Winddle, a collaborative web platform, offers a Transport Booking module to ensure reliable transport booking requests.
Connecting All Stakeholders to Eliminate the Black Box Effect
On Winddle, transport booking requests can be made either directly by your suppliers or by your import/transport team, and transmitted directly to the concerned forwarder (access to the platform or IT integration with the forwarder’s system, as preferred). The user-friendly interface and real-time access to request details by each stakeholder ensure optimized management of transport requests and significant anticipation capability to meet transport needs and ensure smooth operations.
As a shipper, you have a consolidated view of all booking requests for all your suppliers and carriers on a single platform. Any adjustments (changes in dates, volumes, mode of transport, etc.) are shared in real-time with all concerned actors.
Setting Up Coherence Controls to Ensure Reliable Requests
Transport booking and the handover of goods to the forwarder are particularly crucial steps in a supply flow as they often involve a number of business rules/validations. To name a few: booking deadlines (X days before the CRD or ETD) vary depending on the mode of transport, confirmation of the concerned forwarder by the shipper, Quality validation, document reception for customs procedures… Because these rules are specific to each organization/type of goods/origin and destination or other, Winddle allows each organization to easily configure the platform to automate coherence controls, thereby preventing the submission of bookings that do not meet your transport SOP. This way, you ensure that the shared data is of high quality and compliant.
Similarly, Winddle also automates supplier reminders to initiate bookings and update data (quantities, date…) as the goods handover approaches, based on configurable deadlines and rules.
Anticipating Flows at Risk
Beyond the time spent on low-value-added tasks (re-entering information, email chains…), the lack of fluidity in a booking process can mainly impact your supply chain performance: goods orders without booking, booking not accepted because non-compliant, cut-off date missed due to incomplete documentation… Winddle generates dynamic and predictive alerts to identify flows at risk as early as possible. This way, you are no longer caught off guard by operational deviations detected too late, significantly reducing risks!
Using Winddle’s Transport Booking module allows you to simplify and secure the organization of your transports in a simple and collaborative manner.
To learn more about how this solution can help optimize your booking processes, feel free to check out our use cases or contact our team of industry experts.
