Logistics can be a major cost center for your company. Alongside freight expenses, the costs associated with parcel shipments to customers may represent a large — and expanding — segment of your overall budget for the year.
Whether you have multiple parcel shipping carrier agreements or a single parcel shipper contract, you may find your spending rising quarter over quarter. Sometimes, it can be hard to even detect and identify these increases, never mind counteracting them and rolling back rates to more reasonable levels.
The answer can come from your approach to transportation spend management in general, as well as a parcel spend management solution specifically. With a modern methodology that blends advanced technology and best practices, you can bring your parcel spend back under control.
What’s Driving Higher Parcel Contract Spending?
Parcel contracts are highly susceptible to rate increases and hidden costs. Fighting back against this constant drumbeat of added expenses is a challenge, but one your business will have to take to get its logistics spending to a reasonable level.
Carriers consistently negotiate rate increases when it’s time to renew your parcel contract agreements, as well as adding fees and extra clauses that can be tricky to detect. These increases add up, and the result can be significant unexpected spending, quarter over quarter.
One of the reasons why these changes are so difficult to notice and counteract is the sheer volume of information passing through organizations today. Logistics operations in today’s digital business climate produce a vast amount of raw data. Between the extremely long text of contracts and the constant flow of real-time updates from parcel shipments in progress, picking out trends is demanding.
This opacity can also make it difficult to determine whether an individual parcel carrier is meeting service level agreements or following other clauses within a contract. You may be owed reimbursements without knowing it.
It’s clear that this situation needs to change. A modern parcel spend management solution can give you the insights needed to reel in parcel spending.
Learn more about strategies to lock in lower transportation costs.
How Can You Optimize Your Parcel Spend?
Transportation spend management isn’t one-dimensional. Multiple strategic elements can have a direct impact on your level of parcel contract spending:
- Auditing: Performing a parcel audit lets you cut through the vast array of data to determine whether your parcel carrier partners are living up to their end of every contract. This process can detect subtle issues such as missing or incorrectly applied discounts, along with service failures, unnecessary surcharges and more. It can be surprising how much value is lurking in the data.
- Renegotiation/optimization: When the contract optimization process becomes part of transportation spend management, empowered by industry expertise and automation technology, you can take a more precise, effective approach. Measuring total landed cost down to the cent helps you stay informed and gives you the upper hand as you negotiate a new parcel contract with each of your carriers.
- Analytics: Business intelligence and analytics solutions allow you to gain real-time insights into the status of each parcel shipment. By breaking down performance by carrier, region or time frame in specialized dashboards and visualizations, you can sharpen your decision-making process and make meaningful adjustments to the day-to-day execution of your parcel shipment strategy.
These impactful processes are available to your organization today, provided you’re working with the right transportation spend management partner.
Learn all about using parcel contract negotiation to optimize your transportation spending.
Ready To Get Started With Parcel Spend Management?
There’s no wrong time to start taking a closer look at your parcel shipment expenses and driving savings. Partnering with Zero Down Supply Chain Solutions is the ideal way to jumpstart your parcel cost control efforts. Our transportation spend management experts come from logistics backgrounds and can put their specialized knowledge to work finding hidden value within your parcel shipping contracts.
To maximize their effectiveness, these professionals use FreightOptics, our proprietary technology platform, which delivers automation, analytics dashboard access and data-driven insights for your internal team. The combination of experience and technology can give your business the edge it needs in parcel spend management.
Take action to control your parcel shipping cost — contact us today.
