Truckload Transportation - are you paying to ship air ?

How full is a "full" truck?   Not sure?  That's a shame, because when you contract for truckload freight, you pay for the whole vehicle, whether you fill it or not.   As I'll show you, the regulations around what constitutes "full" for weight are very complex.  In addition, the 3D jigsaw puzzle to pack product into the trailer space, distributing weight correctly and minimizing damage is exceptionally challenging.  Get it wrong and you are paying to ship air.  

Do you need daily Point of Sale data? Do you like selling more product?

Most people report on their Point of Sale data in weekly or perhaps even monthly buckets .  If you are interested in seeing a long-term trend or annual seasonality that's OK, but if you really want to know what's going on, to ensure you have product on shelf, and promotions running when your target shoppers are in store - you need daily POS data.  Don't believe me?  Let's look at an example...

Better Point of Sale Reports with "Variance Analysis": Velocity, Distribution and Pricing.. oh my !

Routine, weekly point-of-sale reports tend to look very similar.  For various time buckets (Last week, last 4 weeks, year to date) we total sales in both currency and units then compare to prior year.  Add in a few more measures to look at retail pricing, inventory,  or service level metrics and you may struggle to make it fit on a page.   And from a CPG standpoint, POS  reporting is only half of the story: a CPG's sales targets are not based on POS, they are based on shipments to the retailer.  How can you get a good overview of POS and reconcile that with Shipments all in one report?

How to save real money in truckload freight (Part II)

In the first post in this series (Part I) I looked at the opportunities to reduce freight cost from traditional transportation management, but the really big opportunities may lie outside of your transportation team's control.  In this post, we'll look at some additional (and very possibly larger) opportunities.

 By the time a request hits the Transportation Team the damage has been done.  It’s already been decided that something needs to move, how it needs to move and when it must depart/arrive.  This is where you can really save.

How to save real money in truckload freight (Part I)

How can you save real money in truckload transportation?   In this post, let’s look at the areas that your transportation team manages directly.

How much money can you save from a Transportation Procurement Rate-Bid?

How much money can you really save from a transportation procurement bid? Probably not as much as you might like, but enough to pay for the bid with a good return.

I recently returned from the CSCMP conference in Atlanta where I attended a great session, jointly presented by folks from C.H. Robinson and researchers from Iowa State University.  They have taken a very similar statistical modeling approach to the one I covered in a recent post [..the challenge of transportation rates] to answer questions around the impact of transportation bids and this result is in the public domain. 

Supply Chain Network Optimization: the challenge of transportation rates

Supply Chain Network Optimization can yield major savings but getting clean data to model with (particularly transportation rates) is a major challenge.