Stepping up your Freight Forwarding with Digital Collaboration

A wave of digital disruption has hit the freight forwarders over the past few years and forced them to slowly adapt to a variety of innovative technologies to improve customer experience and eliminate operational inefficiencies. But the COVID-19 pandemic locked down crisis poses the ultimate challenge to review their traditional business model.

Given the work from home situation, the forwarders realized that productivity is no more confined to a physical desk. They understood the importance of digital collaboration that can help them run their business from anywhere using an integrated cloud ERP software.

Traditionally, the freight business functions with several different partners that use systems according to their requirements. In many cases, those systems work in silos and are not even connected department wise within the organization. Digital collaboration helps to integrate and bring all the available data across Ports, Customs, Carriers, Shippers, Consignees, Warehouse, and other stakeholders to eliminate any redundancy and make it easier to get an overview of the overall business scenario. Digital collaboration also ensures no more silos within the company as every individual working in any department from anywhere can synchronize their every activity and task seamlessly. As a result, the business owner is well equipped to handle unexpected events and identify gaps in their freight and logistics business.

Digital automation provides a platform that allows the freight forwarders for fast booking of shipments with more carriers, and move freight much quickly and avoids delays. Thus, a company that embraces digital collaboration stands a chance of engaging and serving its customers fast. Maintaining employees’ productivity while working from home during the pandemic, digitalizing workflows allows the team or employees to do a job within a stipulated time. Data entered once by any individual is used seamlessly across the organization, reduces efforts and errors significantly. ​ Embracing digital collaboration can automate manual processes, eliminate bottlenecks, delays & duplication of work to reduce the job turnaround time by up to 40% thus gives the flexibility to focus on various problem solving and innovative ideas.

The most important advantage of using a collaborative ecosystem is that all departments, including Marketing, Sales, Operations, Field Staff, and Finance, are integrated and work as a single entity. It helps in gathering real-time information, consolidating freight, aggregating data and disseminating the information quickly, exchange documents, and provide real-time insights from anywhere. The digital platform provides the customers the end-to-end visibility of the operations across organizations globally through mobile apps and websites to mobilize their entire team. A shipment can be tracked right from the time of order till delivery with features, including an intuitive and graphical interface and online tracking.

Boosts operational efficiency, reduces costs, improves customer service, and manage employees through seamless digital integration of the entire process with the single integrated logistics and freight forwarding platform. Indeed, this Covid-19 crisis is a wakeup call for businesses to embrace digital transformation, to ensure digital collaboration across functions during and after the pandemic for business continuity.