How is supply chain technology enabling shippers to cope with pent up demand?
With a faint light in sight at the end of the COVID tunnel, pent-up demand has emerged as a major concern for businesses across industries. Every few weeks, there seems to be a speed bump here or an upswing there for the global supply chains, making it impossible to forecast what’s next.
Why the fuss over ‘pent up demand’?
When the pandemic hit the manufacturing hubs, goods couldn’t move despite the demand. For instance, there was a demand for 10,000 packages of a commodity, but the company had to be shut down. The demand remained, but manufacturers couldn’t produce the goods, and hence these goods never made it to the market.
However, with the vaccine roll-out and gradual normalisation of trade patterns, this pent up demand is now set to unleash. But no company today is in the position to accurately forecast this demand let alone prepare their supply chains for the impact.
Countering the muddled demand forecast
Although most companies have abundant data, it hasn’t necessarily served them well during a once-in-a-century event. They need new tools to look at that data differently, solutions that can automate processes and help strategize and achieve business resilience.
It is here that state-of-the-art supply chain technology steps in.
Amid the turmoil, innovative tech solutions are helping companies gain the much-needed agility and have a better chance of not only surviving but thriving during these volatile times.
Automation technology to the rescue
- Automated negotiations to secure best deals
In light of faltering contracts, organisations are rushing to the spot market to keep their goods moving. For companies with hundreds of shipments per month, the traditional practice of manually contacting each vendor and comparing each quote is impractical.
However, competent tech solutions can automate everything from creating enquiries to conducting dynamic negotiations and awarding business for you. This way, you can be sure that you are securing the best deals each time while simultaneously freeing up your logistics team to focus on higher-value tasks.
- Enhanced efficiency through effortless collaboration
Today, there are solutions available in the market that allow you to bring all your stakeholders on board, assign responsibilities, share documents and monitor the movement of goods all on a single platform.
Moreover, built to identify bottlenecks, these systems equip you to stay on top of the process at all times.
- Actionable insights via unprecedented visibility
With port delays becoming a common daily occurrence, manually visiting separate websites to track every single container is nearly impossible.
By adopting solutions that offer real-time visibility over the movement of all your international shipments, you can track all your shipments in real-time on a single window. What’s more? With actionable insights based on advanced data analytics, you can proactively address possible headwinds that could interfere with your shipments’ movement.
- Seamless invoice processing to save time and costs
With cost-saving strategies more important than ever, companies must identify and eliminate hidden costs. Industry studies estimate that manual invoice processing costs around $5 to $12 per invoice. Besides, it is time-consuming, prone to error, and stifles productivity.
But help is at hand with solutions that can automatically match freight invoices to your original quotations and highlight any inconsistencies. These systems can even auto-approve invoices, removing the need for your team to drag their way through the mundane task of matching internal rate sheets with the bills landing on your desk.
The bottom line
With the right technology at hand, you can leverage real-time insights and jump right into problem-solving. Even better, you can see the problems coming even before they impact your business.
For information on how GoComet’s supply chain technology can help you weather the demand imbalance and build supply chain agility, connect with us today!