With cost-saving strategies more important than ever, companies around the world are facing a situation where faltering contracts and a widening gap between container demand and supply is forcing them to turn to the spot market to fulfil shipment orders. For organisations with hundreds of shipments per month, suddenly having to manually create, compare and negotiate each and every rate to ensure they have secured the best deal is straining many beyond breaking point. To ensure the best deals, your vendors need to be engaged in a series of negotiations to shrink their rates. For many, however, relying on the traditional system of negotiation is simply no longer an option. Automate to win, with GoComet’s spot RFQ software Quickly and easily strengthen your supply chain resilience through GoComet’s automated spot RFQ software. Deploying the power of our unique Recursive Rate Reduction system, you can ensure that you receive the very best rates from your vendors, every time, by automating freight negotiations and driving double-digit savings and efficiencies. Create and share inquiries with all of your logistics service providers in seconds and then sit back and relax, as our automated software takes care of the rest. Every time your vendors submit their quotes, the module instantly calculates the net landed costs of their quotation and reveals their rank as compared to their competitors. Crucially, however, the identity and price of their competing vendors remain concealed. As your vendors battle to secure the coveted first rank to increase their chance of winning business, with each bid, your rates are squeezed lower and lower. Low-touch, but high-tech GoComet is the most user-friendly logistics resource management software available in the market today. Whether combined with your existing ERP or as a stand-alone platform, our team will have this up and running for you in...
Freight In COVID 19
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The COVID-19 menace has become a catalyst for organizations across the world to revisit their supply chain networks, examine its vulnerabilities and build resilience. As your business gears up for the world beyond coronavirus, you might be facing questions such as how to emerge stronger from this crisis? How to maintain business stability in the post-COVID world? Is it possible to gain a competitive advantage while recovering from the setback? If you focus on the right strategies that fortify your business for today and tomorrow winning this battle is not too far-fetched. Here are six key takeaways that will help you navigate better in the world beyond the pandemic: Time for proactive crisis management for the freight ecosystem The present crisis is a stark reminder that we need proactive and not reactive crisis management. A proactive approach stands on a well-planned and collaborative ground where teams are in a better position to handle disruptions. Readiness to respond to disruptions cannot be achieved overnight and requires a flexible ecosystem. Adopting a proactive approach means diversifying sources, having a system that facilitates remote working, fully understand one’s network and having thorough supply chain visibility on operations. Undoubtedly, the post-COVID world will leave behind those with limited appetite for flexibility and diversification. Supply chain visibility matters the most Your immediate response to the pandemic should be focusing on improving visibility over your supply chains and extended networks. Companies that have visibility across their supply network have responded well to the crisis by making specific decisions. They are in the position to sense, respond and even predict how their supply chains will react to disruptions. Without supply chain visibility, it is impossible to understand and assess the impact of disruptions. It is as simple as this, you cannot prevent or manage a problem without knowing...
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Spiraling freight rates have left businesses around the world scrambling to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, piling yet more pressure on already stretched global supply chains. At the core of this problem: shrinking cargo space. Here’s what has led to a decrease in cargo capacity and how it is impacting freight rates. Airplanes grounded, but rates flying high Air freight rates are reaching abnormal highs as 90% of the airlines have grounded their planes amid lockdowns in various parts of the world. There are limited spots available on cargo planes and as manufacturing units in China are slowly recovering, shippers are striving to book them. Generally, over half of the world’s air freight moves in the belly of passenger planes. The present situation, however, has forced shippers to turn to cargo planes. A recent report by Business Standard stated that China’s air cargo capacity has gone down by 39% relative to last year because of the cuts to passenger flights. Blank sailings have opened the door to low supply Shipping lines are cutting down on the number of sailings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to an increase in blank sailing where scheduled voyages are suspended or canceled, containers are piling up at ports and freight rates are increasing despite a drop in crude oil prices. A further reason is that local markets have started facing the brunt of the crisis: as the spending capacity of consumers is compromised, orders are being canceled which in turn leads to yet more blank sailings. Moreover, cargo is beginning to accumulate across several ports as shipping lines skip calls to avoid sailing without full loads. To fetch better margins, operators are trying to reduce the number of ships to make sure that the carriers that actually sail are completely filled. According...
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As the world continues to battle the coronavirus pandemic, our reliance on supply chains has never been more starkly illustrated. From medicine to medical supplies, facemasks to foodstuff, manufacturers and their logistic teams are working round-the-clock to ensure that essential goods are being delivered. Many though find themselves close to breaking point, as country lockdowns and chronic container shortages cripple their ability to keep the world’s goods moving. It is here that technology can help. GoComet’s Logistics Resource Management (LRM) platform makes it possible for companies to comprehensively transform the way that their supply chains operate, creating process resilience and driving double-digit cost savings. Cloud-based, our easy-to-use software is quick to set up and can be rapidly extended across organizations and is simple to integrate with existing systems. Automated Spot RFQs – the best deal at the best price As freight contract rates across the world lose their competitiveness, organizations 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 and every vendor, and comparing each quote becomes impossible. GoComet’s Freight quote platform offers an innovative solution to this problem, by automating the negotiation for you and allowing you to create and share inquiries with all your vendors simultaneously. RFQs can be created and submitted to vendors in seconds, who can then submit their quotes and see their rank compared to their competitors but crucially, not their price or identity. Through compound negotiation via vendors’ efforts to secure the first rank and increase their chance of winning business, the rate you pay keeps shrinking, ensuring that by the end of the bidding process you can win the best deal at the best price. Track & Trace on a single dashboard Knowing exactly where your...
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Reducing costs is a key goal for most companies. Some expenses, however, are more difficult to see than others: they remain hidden, silently eating away at your profits whilst your competitors gain a critical pricing advantage from this lapse. The cost of manually reconciling freight invoices is a common example where organisations are spending too much. Industry studies estimate that manual invoice processing costs around $5 to $12 per invoice. It is time-consuming, prone to error, inefficient for your operations and accounts teams and stifles productivity. But help is at hand with GoComet’s innovative software solution: fully deployed in as little as 2 weeks, GoComet’s automation can save you up to 76% of the total time taken to reconcile your invoices. Here’s how it works GoComet’s software automatically matches freight invoices to your original quotations and highlights any inconsistencies. The system can even auto-approve invoices, removing the need for your team to drag their way through the mundane (yet often complicated) task of matching internal rate sheets with the bills landing on your desk. Approximately 75% of logistics leaders believe that there are negligible discrepancies between the final quotation and invoice. Add this to the sheer volume of invoices logistics teams receive, and it’s clear that costly mistakes can, and do, happen. From our own data, we have discovered that up to 60% of invoices do not match the final quotation. Moreover, in about 20% of the cases, these discrepancies go unchecked. Even minor errors can combine to make a huge difference to your bottom line, causing overpayment, and duplicate payments and lost productivity. So how does GoComet help? Once the vendor uploads the invoice on the GoComet platform, our software initiates the auto-verification process. This process is carried out through a combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, contextual...
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The coronavirus pandemic is a wake-up call for the logistics industry to adopt digital transformation. To contain the spread of COVID-19, work from home policy has become a norm across countries. However, it is challenging for an industry steeped in traditions to implement remote working. For an industry where ensuring transparency and efficiency is tough even in the normal course, change is difficult in light of such unprecedented disruptions. But it is worth noting that digitally transformed organizations have experienced a comparatively smooth transition. They have adapted to the present circumstances seamlessly in terms of remote working and managing overall operations. Here is how companies that have digitized their logistics management have an edge in the present situation: 1. Easy container tracking on a single dashboard Companies are increasingly experiencing delays and failing supply chains. Manually visiting several websites and tracking containers like before is impossible now. However, companies that adopted digital tracking systems in the past are at an advantage. They are able to track all their shipments with ease on a single dashboard. We have observed a 62% rise in the usage of GoComet’s container tracking platform in light of the pandemic. We have also noticed that many clients have started using the platform to track shipments set out from multiple manufacturing units across the globe to get quick updates. 2. Today everything is ‘real-time’ Data today is getting outdated by the day given the volatility of the situation. We don’t know what will happen next week, let alone forecasts for the next quarter. Even a week old data is deemed to be irrelevant today. But digitized businesses are getting quick and real-time updates from automated systems. These systems have enabled them to make informed decisions even in such uncertain times. 3. Scalable platform is a boon Companies...
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Ever since the novel coronavirus reared its ugly head, the global manufacturing industry has been at the receiving end of the menace. With partial and complete lockdowns gripping over half the world, most of the companies have resorted to the work from home option, a comfort particularly unavailable to the logistics department of manufacturing-based industries. The industry today is facing the fierce challenge of carrying out ground level operations while trying to be in compliance with government directives. Moreover, the impaired shipping industry has only added to the trouble. With the export and import of goods coming to a near standstill, some manufacturers are struggling to continue their production while the others are struggling to manage their manufactured goods. Though China, the epicentre of the outbreak is slowly bouncing back to normalcy there is still a long way to go before the world recovers from the crisis. Absolute suspension of manufacturing process or logistics department’s services in all its likelihood is not a viable option. The next wisest option is to think of innovative ways to endure the situation. As a company that manufactures goods, it is time to equip your company with ways to efficiently manage this adversity. Here are six practices you can adopt to fight COVID-19 successfully: 1. Vigilance and awareness does no harm Appoint a team to screen your employees for any symptoms at the entry point of the work space. Conduct a workshop and educate them about the safety measures they need to adopt. If any employee is symptomatic refer him to the concerned authorities. If possible, arrange for a quarantine facility to assist him/her. Do not put the lives of other employees at risk by entertaining symptomatic people at work place. 2. Hygiene first Be it the administrative staff or the on ground workers,...
