Cut your delivery times and reduce costs by automating and consolidating your shipments

19th January 2021

As delivering shipments on time is one of your main priorities as a 3PL, you will want this process to be as efficient and seamless as possible. How can you do this? By automating your shipping rules and consolidating your shipments.

When your shipping policy involves multiple senders, carriers, sales channels and countries, it becomes harder to manually work out the best delivery method for each shipment. Doing this is both time consuming and increases the risk of manual errors occurring.

This not only leads to unhappy customers because of the increased costs and delays when shipping their parcels, but also frustrated recipients due to longer delivery windows and failed deliveries.

Consignor for Logistics can automate your shipping rules based on your predefined rules set-up by picking the right carrier for each shipment before printing the label.

Automation should be at the heart of your shipping process

To save your warehouse staff time and reduce manual errors, you can automate carrier allocation based on cost, parcel weight, dimensions and more through customizable shipping rules.

Based on how you have defined the shipping rules for each of your customers, e.g. “choose the cheapest transport option” or “allocate specific shipments to a specific carrier” etc. Consignor for Logistics automates the carrier allocation for each shipment before printing the shipping label.

Not only does this reduce time, manual errors and freight costs, you also utilize your carriers’ strengths.

“It’s not just about favorable carrier rates and volume discounts, but also the quality of the delivery experience and choosing the right carrier for each shipment. Each carrier has their strengths, with certain carriers specializing at handling larger parcels, while other carriers are better positioned to handle fragile parcels and so on,” says Gary Carlile, Chief Sales Officer at Consignor.

Shipment data is transferred automatically

An important step in automating your shipping is making sure that your key systems are integrated.

With your key systems integrated, your staff don’t have to manually input data into different systems, as shipment data is automatically exchanged between systems. This leads to improved data quality and minimizes the risk of errors and potential delays.

Ultimately, integrating your systems allows you to automate your shipping processes and provide a seamless delivery experience for your customers every time.

Destination: Consolidation

When shipping high volumes of parcels, you will inevitably have multiple parcels heading for the same destination. However, shipping each one individually increases costs and has a negative environmental impact.

Instead of having an inefficient process and using several carriers, Consignor for Logistics consolidates individual orders that are being sent to the same destination into one shipment, saving you time and reducing your freight costs even more.

“Our customers experience fewer errors in deliveries due to better tracking and control with Consignor as well as a higher delivery speed. Carriers are pleased that we use Consignor, as we are able to handle their demands for updated routes, formats, products, validations and so on. This means that carriers do not have to wait for us and we don’t ship to the wrong addresses, ” says Fredrik Krysén, Transport Director at Aditro Logistics.

This article is the second in a series of articles around how to Gain Control of Your Logistics Supply Chain. You can read the first article “Integrate your key systems to gain control of your logistics supply chain” here.

Download our free e-book to learn more about how Consignor for Logistics can optimize your shipping.