At Motivational, we're committed to being leaders in the omnichannel fulfillment space. An essential part of providing a seamless fulfillment experience is ensuring visibility. This is a topic we're passionate about, and we're thrilled to have our friends at Anvyl guest blog for us here to share their expertise.
Top 5 Best Practices for Better Logistics Visibility
We’ve all been there: you’ve planned the perfect vacation. You booked your tickets and hotel months ago, made reservations for your favorite restaurants, and planned how you’ll get from one location to the next.
Then you find out your flight is canceled, which means you'll miss your connecting flight. Now you're paying for a hotel room, it's too late to cancel, you'll lose that hard-to-get dinner reservation, and you're going to spend the next several hours trying to reschedule and rebook.
Managing logistics efficiently, even when unexpected disruptions pop up, is crucial, whether it involves vacation plans— or the movement of goods in your supply chain from point A to point B.
The key to it all? Complete visibility into all of the people, products, and processes involved.
Visibility continues to be one of the most critical aspects of managing overall logistics in the supply chain. In fact, our recent State of Supply Chain of more than 600 consumer brands found that 52% of respondents identify visibility as a top priority this year.
Greater visibility into logistics planning and execution helps you make faster, better-informed decisions throughout your supply chain. As a result, you can effectively minimize risk, keep goods flowing, and manage disruptions—no matter what challenges arise.
So, where should you start when you want to increase logistics visibility for your brand? Start by following these best practices.
1. Identify gaps in your existing processes
Start by auditing your existing processes to identify gaps that negatively impact your overall supply chain efficiency. You can do this in a simple checklist format or by asking yourself some of the following questions to start:
- Can you see how each purchase order is progressing? Can you easily tell when important tasks and/or actions that move purchase orders toward shipment are completed?
- Do stakeholders have all of the documentation they need leading up to shipment?
Can your team and external partners quickly access BOLs, invoices, and SLAs at the right time? - How well do you manage shipping timelines and costs? Can you book freight easily and see when payments are due? Can you see how multiple SKUs within an order were shipped? Can you easily split and /or consolidate shipments to save money on shipping costs?
If you’re facing a lot of bottlenecks, specifically when it comes to shipping and fulfillment, consider working with a 3PL partner to extend your reach and grow your business.
With help from a fulfillment partner like Motivational Fulfillment, you can fill orders faster, ship quicker, and reduce the strain on your in-house resources.
This allows you to increase your customer base and deliver better customer experiences, all while spending more time on marketing and sales to reach new audiences.
2. Prioritize communication and collaboration
Managing daily logistics means communicating with not only your own team but also with suppliers or other partners.
For many brands, this communication takes place over email, texts, or one-off phone calls. However, it can be easy to lose track of important documents buried deep in email chains, and miscommunications can add up to bigger issues that negatively impact your supply chain.
Instead, centralize all of your communication and documentation with the help of an integrated supply chain management solution.
For example, you can establish a chain of custody and create a chronological activity log to easily reference historical information, see conversations between parties, and receive notifications with relevant notes when suppliers or shipping partners complete essential tasks.
3. Look for areas to automate
Tracking purchase orders via spreadsheets might work for businesses just getting up and running with production. However, once your business expands or scales, relying on manual processes or entering the same data into different systems to track any aspect of your supply chain can hold you back.
Not only is it easy for human errors to slip through the cracks, but you waste time, money, and other precious resources on day-to-day tasks to manage your supply chain, which keeps you distracted from focusing on more important aspects of your business.
The best way to take back your time? Leverage automation.
With more new supply chain technology available to brands today than ever before, brands can now easily automate different aspects of the supply chain to save time and money.
Most importantly, automation ultimately gives you more visibility into daily operations and your supply chain's overall efficiency.
For example, supply chain management software like Anvyl can help you easily manage your international and domestic inbound logistics shipments with automated milestones.
Anvyl’s system can automatically reach out to your internal team, third parties, or suppliers for updates on all your required milestones.
Plus, integration with carriers means that every critical shipping milestone is automatically marked complete. Anvyl can even trace inbound logistics across the ocean and air with direct integrations and out-of-the-box capabilities that cover 98% of global ocean movements.
Automations also provide access to real-time tracking and insightful data across your supply chain.
4. Implement real-time tracking
Real-time tracking is the best way to maintain complete visibility into every stage of your supply chain.
It allows everyone on your team, plus external partners, to access the most accurate and up-to-date information about purchase orders, shipments and more so your whole team can make the most informed decisions possible, even when they need to react in record time.
Even better, with the help of supply chain management technology, teams can access all of this information in one spot via dashboards.
Dashboards aggregate all your most important data so every team member can get a high-level view of important information like open orders, part pricing, and lead times—as well as supplier payments due, inbound shipments, supplier performance metrics and more.
With this bird' s-eye view of the inbound supply chain, logistics operation teams can quickly identify risks and make more informed decisions, saving time and preventing late shipments.
If you’re considering implementing new supply chain technology for the first time, ask about dashboards and other reporting options within the tool.
5. Leverage data to make more informed decisions
Leveraging data from across your supply chain is undoubtedly the best way to increase overall logistics visibility and run a more efficient supply chain from purchase order creation to shipment to warehouse.
However, accessing this data isn’t always possible, especially if you use manual processes or disconnected systems that don’t integrate well to manage your logistics operations.
Connecting all of your data from across multiple systems leaves room for manual errors and wastes time.
Therefore, centralizing your logistics data in a single place that everyone on your team can easily access is the easiest way to increase visibility into your logistics operations.
For example, look for logistics technology that provides updated reporting across all of your shipments. This data can help you analyze production and shipment data for more accurate forecasting and ordering.
By following these best practices, you can increase visibility into your logistics and supply chain operations and drive more positive outcomes for your business.
About Anvyl
Anvyl connects global supply chain teams, systems, and suppliers to improve collaboration and decision-making from pre-PO issuance to warehouse delivery. This flexible tool facilitates real-time collaboration, automates key tasks and processes, and empowers teams with deeper insights that allow them to make smarter decisions faster.
To learn more, visit www.anvyl.com.