Driving digital transformation: Top 4 questions for forwarders

No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come”

Victor Hugo

We cannot deny that digitalization was slowly and steadily increasing its grip over the business world across the globe. The dream of an ideal economy where all companies getting benefitted from the digital platform was not very far.

However, the COVID-19 crisis has significantly increased the speed of digitalization, and within a few months or a year, it will completely envelop the world.

Of course, the benefits of digitalization are many, and all successful logistics companies use those benefits to get an edge over their competitors. They use digital platforms for risk management, data analysis, customer connection, tracking consignments, and a lot more. With technical support, freight and logistics companies boost up their forwarding business and get rewarding business plans.

Newage comes across scores of forwarders and logistics experts daily while working in the freight and logistics industry. They always have questions about how the future of the freight industry will unfold itself. More than 90% of the discussions hover around the upcoming technological changes in the freight and logistics industry.

We have chalked down Top-4 regularly asked questions with their answers from our SMEs. Once you read all these questions, you will accept the increasing importance of digitalization in the forwarding industry. All your vacillation toward shifting your business to the digital platform will vanish out.

The major challenge of today’s freight forwarder is how to keep their customer retained? One of the key aspects is to earn customer’s credibility and trust. Providing shipment visibility and transparent communication starting from sales enquiry to real time updates on each shipment milestone goes a long way in gaining the trust. To serve this, freight forwarders need to maintain all their business information in a single place, right from the sourcing prospective clients, receiving enquires, quotation, approvals, booking confirmations, collaborating with shipping liners and transporters, tracking shipment and delivery, followed by billing and collection. Several Technologies had made digital supply chain a reality today. Please find the evolution of technologies in digital supply chain technology landscape

Question 1: How to streamline the freight operations onto one system?

If you are still relying on multiple systems and manually analysing the data, then you are missing out on various valuable insights. Today forwarders use Power BI Report which works almost similar to the artificial intelligence programming and draws out accurate reports by analysing piles of unsynchronised data.

Newage’s eFreight Suite is a single-window platform for freight solutions that address all your forwarding needs. For example, when a purchase order is entered by an operator from a customer, eFreight Suite automatically notifies the concerned users of the booking request. They can then view the details about the demand and decide on the most cost-effective shipping lines, method, and schedule.

This system increases your business efficiency and reduces errors from manual re-entering data. It also keeps both the buyer and seller informed about the whereabouts of the cargo, enabling collaboration between all involved parties.

Question 2: Can you easily integrate your operations with your customers?

Multiple groups of people working across different systems, languages, locations, and currencies can notably reduce your visibility with low-quality shipment data, time-consuming and manual workarounds.

No matter how simple your logistics operations are, deep integrations give your internal staff visibility over the movement of your shipments. The integrated system can tell the shipment’s whereabouts, whether it is within the country or has crossed the international border. With Newage’s eFreight Suite, you can extend this visibility to your customers, government, partners, and third-party systems spread across different geographies.

Question 3: Is real-time data is available for all across your operations?

Today in this tech-savvy world, even a single search on google leaves behind its trace about your choice, nature, and more. So a digitally operated shipment leaves behind piles of data about its history, cargo shift, track record, and more. And logistics companies use these to retain their customers by reading their behaviour, choices and more. So this automated data can help forwarders both ways, they can keep track of their carriers and customers’ behaviour.

Sharing data in real-time across your business operations and automating your processes can immensely help your forwarding company. Newage gives you an end-to-end encrypted data report, BI report, which assists you while crafting future business plans. With this report, you can access the behaviour of your customers and carrier and ensure a seamless movement of cargo along the supply chain.

Question 4: Can you scale your operations with high-on-demand cloud technology?

The best part of cloud technology is that it remains operative even from a remote area. This benefit allows forwarders to remain vigilant about their work and can keep track of the employees.

Cloud technology has become a lifeline for businesses and operators across the freight and logistics industry. It helps forwarders scaling their business efficiencies and operations by reducing costs, and increasing the profit margin.

eFreight Suite is a strategically made, SaaS-based cloud application that helps forwarders get-ridding of owning, buying, and maintaining physical data centers. They can access all functionalities over the internet on a web browser.

Now store your data in an end-to-end encrypted and fully centralized location, which you can access from anywhere at any time. Additionally, eFreight comes with a ‘Pay-per-use” facility, where you only pay for the features you use. So this NEXT-GEN system lowers your operating costs, allows you to scale your business operations based on the business requirements, reduces your infrastructure costs and investment costs.

Newage’s eFreight Suite has been recognized by CIO REVIEW INDIA as the ten most promising logistics providers of 2021. It has all those features which help forwarders focusing on their forwarding work.

Now the appropriate time has come for the idea of completely digitalizing the business world, so no force on this universe can stop it. Adjust with it and accrue benefits.

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