If your business deals with production and transportation, you need a logistics management system (LMS). An LMS organizes your entire production process and makes your business more profitable.
Discussed below are five transport and logistics software solutions to keep your business running productively.
5 Ways Logistics Software Affects Businesses Positively
If you aren’t familiar with logistics, these five examples below will teach you more about it and the benefits of logistics software:
1. Resource Management
Without materials, you don’t have a business. Resource gathering logistics is crucial after you’ve found a supplier. You’ll need to keep track of:
- Shipment costs
- Storage costs
- Potential backorder delays from the supplier
- The priority your company has for the supplier
- How much the resource actually costs
- Unexpected fees and steps
Using logistics software, you can track all this virtually. Depending on the type of software, you can program alerts when you’re running low and need to reorder. With an accounting integration, you can automatically add resource and shipping costs to your monthly balance.
2. Inventory Organization
Keeping your inventory organized is essential for a business—whether you’re storing items in a warehouse or your garage. You need to know how much stock you have, where different products are, and when you need to make more.
Making a mistake in any of these key areas causes a negative snowball effect on your productivity. This is why logistic software really is superior to archaic manual tracking—particularly those specifically designed for warehouse management.
By inputting all information into a warehouse management system (WMS), your new storage organization is accessible to everyone and is easy to change. You can even use a system where all changes are made automatically when someone scans a product’s barcode.
This type of logistic software also keeps track of data for KPIs, gets orders out faster, and assists future business decisions. Around 85% of warehouses/distribution centers use a WMS.
3. Transportation Management (Inbound and Outbound)
Keeping track of how your product is getting to the customer is complicated. You need to decide on:
- The best way to ship the product
- The best carrier based on price and experience
- The best route when multiple carriers are involved
- What date to tell the customer to expect delivery
- How to handle customs and regulations when shipping internationally
Transport managers also need to document shipments, billing, and performance so they can be used in future analytic analyses.
This is a benefit of transportation management systems—it makes doing all this easier. You can ensure your products get delivered to customers on time and intact. If there is a delay, the software alerts both you and your customer.
If there is a return, the process is simple for the customer to send the product back, and for you to reenter it into the system.
4. Order Fulfillment
Once a customer orders, the product(s) must be promptly found, packed, and shipped to their address. For orders, you can add order management software (OMS) to your logistics system to streamline the process from start to finish.
An OMS system handles everything from when the client makes the order to when it’s delivered to the customer. Both you and the customer can track the order’s location and how it’s being delivered.
You can also add an accounting integration to create invoices and accept payments.
5. Demand Forecasting
Demand forecasting is crucial to keep your business running over time. Every business has slow and busy seasons so you can save money. 84% of consumers say delays would cause them to cancel an order.
Because you’ve been using logistics with your warehousing and order fulfillment, you can easily track when the need for your product is high or low. This way, you can prevent selling out or having backstock.
Get a Custom Made Logistics System with Excel SoftSources
As you can see, an all-encompassing logistics management system streamlines your entire production process. But, initially, creating and operating an LMS is difficult, especially if you want the logistics management software applications to talk to each other.
Excel SoftSources has expert engineers ready to help you or your team create and maintain a customized LMS. Learn more about all the technical help our engineers can provide.
