On-Demand Logistics Services Makes It Difficult to Plan and Consolidate
It is challenging to balance between on-demand logistics services and planning to achieve the target efficiency. Many 4PL companies solve this equation by putting in services limits and restrictions hence more planning and consolidation time at the expense of logistics volume to be managed.
Last Minute Logistics Services = Higher Fees
Many 4PL companies use conventional equation on last minute customer service demands. That is to penalize it and encourage customers to plan and get a better price next time round. Does this work in logistics? The definite answer is no.
Lack of Supply to Fulfill On-Demand Service Requests
The Dream: Just-In-Time Service Providers offering services based on Customers demand. The Reality: Most Service Providers put opportunistic premium pricing to fulfil unplanned demand. The Result: Customers decline it due to unrealistic pricing.
Complex Orchestration Resulting in Less Predictability in Shipment P&L
Good planning is difficult when the requested services becomes more complex. This means that 4PL companies need to rely heavily on their planners’ knowledge and judgments to achieve the intended margin in the overall shipment P&L.
“Lessons Learned” Just Become Good Jargons Within The Organization
An agreed plan turns out to be a total failure. Everybody says it is “lessons learned” and not to repeat the same mistakes again. Few months down the road, the same mistakes happens. The same planning team missed the same details again and again.
Intelligent Planning in One Platform, both from machine and human perspective.
We put advanced intelligent planning in the platform, based on objective data points as well as human accumulated knowledge and judgments. In our platform, planners have the capability to put in their wisdom and influence the planning outcome with clear auditability and ownership.
Disruptive Planning is Our Game
Plan is not set in stone. Changes are unavoidable. Our technology provides on-the-fly changes to the plan, even while it is being executed. This enables last minute requests from customers to be served with minimum hassle.
Supply is not Purely Driven by Demand. It Can Be Served Using Our “Inventory”
Our platform uses the term “Service Catalog Inventory Level” to denote the availability of certain services provided by our partners. Healthy “Inventory Level” is being kept, monitored and managed to serve these on-demand requests.
Good Execution Plan = Healthy Shipment P&L
Our platform allows human knowledge to be instilled inside the platform. It gives suggestions to the plan and captures planner feedback for the next iteration. Furthermore, the engine also estimates Shipment P&L along with the plan iteration.
Easily Capture Planner Knowledge and Feedback
Every lessons learned are captured along with the plan in the same platform hence others will really learn from it. Alerts and notifications on these lessons learned are clearly displayed at the earliest when the planning session starts.