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Transportation and Logistics (T&L) companies play a pivotal role in the movement of goods through the
supply chain. The overall throughput and efficiency of their operations is directly dependent on the ability to
accurately track location and status of all their shipments and mobile assets as these traverse the supply chain.
Surprisingly even today, location and status is mostly tracked using paper-based manifests that rely on manual data
collection and entry. This results in inaccurate and untimely data that pose a number of challenges to carriers.
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T&L companies have to routinely deal with limited capacity at freight consolidation and
cross-docking facilities. Effectively scheduling this capacity depends on having an accurate idea of what each
shipment contains and when and where it is due. This allows carriers to prioritize loading or unloading while
optimizing throughput and warehouse capacity. The problem today is that paper-based shipment manifests are hard
to process and can result in sub-optimal allocation of resources overall. Read more about our Yard Managment Solutions
Before shipping products, suppliers typically aggregate units of product into cases, cases into pallets and pallets into
containers. As pallets and containers make their way through the supply chain to their destination, carriers often have
a need to find out which particular cases or units are contained within in order to properly route the container or
pallet to its destination. With traditional paper-based manifests, this can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process
requiring manual intervention.
To address this, carriers are increasingly tagging cases or unit product with bar-codes and
even passive RFID tags – as part of retail mandates, to help better track products in transit. However, process and other
limitations often make it difficult to read RFID tags or even bar-codes on cases when they have been aggregated and
packaged into a pallet or a container. In order to improve processing throughput, carriers need a better electronic
manifest that provides instant visibility into the nested contents of a container or pallet.
The operational efficiency of T&L companies depends on their ability to quickly locate and
effectively utilize all their mobile assets such as trucks, trailers, tugs and forklifts. Knowing the status of these
assets such as how many of these assets are available in which warehouse or yard or when they will arrive at a given
location is critical to efficient operations. However, the dynamic and chaotic nature of this industry makes it particularly
challenging to keep accurate track of all the constantly moving mobile assets. |
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