Shippers would like to reduce their costs and increase service for customer satisfaction and customer retention. This is according to research by Descartes on shippers' executive objectives and ICT support in the logistics process.
74 per cent of respondents indicated that reducing costs was high on their priority list. Remarkably, a large proportion of respondents believe that transport costs could be reduced by up to 10 per cent by deploying ICT, but in the meantime are not taking action on this.
Increasing customer service is considered important by 63 per cent of executives. In addition, shippers want to have more financial control over logistics costs (45 per cent) and improve insight into logistics flows (44 per cent). Also, a quarter of shippers are looking to improve the logistics flow for fulfilment.
Frequent application use
Descartes also asked shippers about the use of ICT innovation. For the primary logistics process, 82 per cent of shippers use a WMS and ERP system. Half of the companies use two to three applications to control the logistics process, 21 per cent use four or more.
In addition, 82 per cent believe that data integration for tracking & tracing has been achieved. In practice, only 22 per cent appear to have the data in their own system, three quarters retrieve the info manually from the carrier's portal. Only a third of shippers have a Transport Management System that includes outsourced logistics activities. "In order to get an integral grip on the logistics process, more visibility on outsourced transport in particular is needed," responds Roy van Aalst, Senior Director Benelux at Descartes.
Editorial LogistiekProfs
