5 Ways to Cut Enterprise Shipping Costs
Posted by Rachel Rodenborg on Wed, Feb 23, 2011 @ 07:38 AM
As the economy begins its recovery, companies continue to look for ways to cut costs and improve their bottom line. Shipping is often an area within a business that is considered for potential cost savings.
In that vein, this post will look at 5 ways to cut costs within an enterprise shipping department:
- Negotiate with your carriers. If you haven't negotiated with your parcel and LTL carriers in awhile, this is always a great place start--especially if your business with them has increased. Ask for better rates--they aren't likley to offer them to you. The worst they can say is no.
- Cut out unnecessary actions. Take a close look at how an order progresses through your shipping department. Are there any unnecessary steps you can eliminate? If you can eliminate a step or two from every shipment that goes out your door, the time savings will add up and the extra time can be used to improve your daily shipping volume.
- Eliminate duplication. Unless your shipping system is fully integrated with your ERP, ecommerce, and accounting systems, you are certainly duplicating data entry somewhere. Possibly in a lot of places. Is there a way that you can integrate your shipping systems with the rest of your business systems, sharing data between them and reducing or eliminating the need to rekey data into each separate system? While there might be some cost associated with such an effort, the outcome will definitely justify the additional cost. And eliminating data entry reduces the chance of an error that could cost your department a substantial sum.
- Automate outgoing communications. Are you still sending out shipment notification email messages manually each day? Are you still having to transfer tracking numbers from your carrier's system to your ecommerce system or to an email? This is an enormous time waster that can easily be remedied through system integration. There will be a cost associated with integrating, but the integration will most likely pay for itself in a year or less if you are a large shipping operation.
- Make the "icky" paperwork easy. International shipping and hazardous materials shipping are two subjects that most shipping professionals would rather avoid. The reality is you likely have to deal with one or both of them on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Take the pain out of the paperwork by making sure that your shipping software does the hard work for you automatically. The computer "remembers" what documents you need based on the products you are shipping and keeps you in the clear from what can be incredibly costly fines for improperly completed or filed paperwork.
Ready to learn how you can save up to $50,000 on your shipping activities this year? Check out the on-demand webinar, Seeing (Shipping) is Believing to learn how!
Photo credit: AMagill.