The holiday season is upon us. All forms of transportation have been strained by the huge influx of online ordering and the continuing coronavirus situation. There’s a huge opportunity for shippers and forwarders to increase profits or lose customers. It all comes down to proper logistics planning. If you don’t plan carefully, you’ll get caught with no transportation for your freight.
Learn more about how amping up your capacity is essential to finishing out your Q4 in the black.
What You Need to Consider When Logistics Planning
Logistics planning is complicated, but the anticipated holiday season rush is projected to be far beyond any we’ve seen so far, making it much more difficult to navigate. With huge holiday deals at every business, driver shortages and capacity limitations loom large in front of us. Careful planning is required to avoid some painful situations this holiday season. Below are some potential scenarios shippers and forwarders could run into if your plan doesn’t adapt with the times.
Scenario 1: The Ultimate Nightmare Before Christmas, Stranded Cargo
You had a last-minute shipment or waited too long to lock in dates. As a result, you’ve been unable to secure a truck or other transportation for your goods. Now, your shipment won’t make it on time. It may sit in a yard for days, leading to costly fines. Meanwhile, you’re scrambling to find the carrier services you need to get things moving again.
Scenario 2: Spending Your Holiday Profits on Shipping
You may not always have the nightmare scenario where your freight is stranded somewhere without transport. You may have another situation where you have to pay rates much higher than you’d like to or can afford to pay. Thus, making the busiest time of the year exponentially less profitable.
Scenario 3: Santa (Your Freight) Doesn’t Make It on Christmas
You’ve done everything right, or so you thought. The West Coast is backed up and not getting any better. Your goods have come from Asia, and now they’re held up on the West Coast. Finding the right carrier to keep things moving before they stop is vital to avoiding stress this holiday season.
What the Logistics Industry is Doing to Prepare
Carriers are doing what they can to improve their capacity. For instance, UPS is hiring more than 100,000 seasonal employees. FedEx and the US Postal service are hiring as well. There’s been a considerable uptick in trucking hires too. These are all positive moves, but truck capacity is still lagging behind. Air and sea transport are also overburdened. That means shippers and forwarders need a strategy to keep the ball rolling.
How We Can Help The Holiday Season Go Smoothly For Shippers & Forwarders
At Freight Management Inc, we can help your holiday season go off without a hitch. We provide shippers and forwarders with the tools and resources you need to be successful 365 days a year, even when things get crazy.
Using our Draydex system, you can better understand and leverage the drayage spot market. We offer a Book Now feature with much more competitive rates than other companies in the market. You’ll also enjoy high-level access to market rates, a free rate management system for your drayage carrier rates and the ability to track shipments from start to finish.
Our Draydex system solves logistics problems. Gain actionable insights, solve container drayage issues, and tap into our leveraged network of draymen. We have greater domestic visibility and email notifications. We have a tier-1 data center boasting a 99.7% uptime and 24/7 web-based access.
We’ll get you through the holidays and every other busy season to come.