Helpful Articles
Accelerate your business journey. Streamline order processing!
The transportation of goods is highly complex. Why make your order processing more difficult than it needs with a manual system?
I’ve spoken to a lot of hauliers over the years about how they started out and how they’ve grown their transport companies from nothing, into successful operations.
They all have one thing in common…… at some point on their business journey, they were struggling to get work done with their manual way of working. They said their manual systems were the root of their problems, and their problem started with Orders and Job Entry.
So what had changed?
In a word – growth.
Because the businesses were doing more, their manual processes just weren’t up to the task. In fact, they were having a detrimental effect on staff, the business and their customers.
Whether they were working later and later every night to type orders into a system for the next day, or having to go in to the office at midnight to change the plan and produce the documents needed. One thing was clear…..they had less and less time available to do the things needing to be done.
They were finding it harder to keep up with their work, and doing it right.
Do it do it again! with a manual system
Listening to hauliers explain: ‘how they used to work’ and how time-consuming their Orders and Job Entry process had become, they were amazed, relieved and sometimes bewildered how they’d stuck with the manual way of working for so long.
One bulk haulage operator I spoke to explained how his process used to work.
“We were doing a lot of manual job creation and job entry. My products team would send us a .pdf document of a sales ticket. The admin would then print off the .pdf’s and create each job manually on our bespoke system. One by one. We were doing over 500 jobs a day. That was a lot of manual work!”
Now it takes a minute to create 500 jobs!
“With the help of our new TMS, tickets are now imported automatically. They just drop into the system. 500 jobs in a minute! It’s saving us 2.5 days in man-hours per week.
He said: The automation was a ‘big time-saver’ giving his team the time they needed to focus on their customers – “managing from the point of collection to the point of delivery.”
The customer’s relief was obvious. The TMS had helped them improve their business process and lifted the burden of inputting hundreds of jobs every day.
Not only was this saving time, but it was enabling staff to get on and do the things that added real value to the business.
Are you having the same problems?
There are ways to remove the manual and repetitive work you do. With a little effort upfront, you can streamline the job creation and ordering process with a TMS (transport management system).
You can have more time and achieve greater efficiencies through automated processes.
They improve business efficiency and continuity, as well as valuing staff time by removing unnecessary time consuming activities; allowing them to focus on what really matters most – your customers.
We recently asked customers how things had improved since they’d digitised their Orders and Job Entry process. 7 OUT OF 10 COMPANIES said they’d saved 10 hours or more a week on data entry alone using a TMS.
No more:
- Duplication of work and effort
- Mistakes, leading to lost time and lost revenue
- Errors or rework
- Uncertainty
Now:
- It’s easy to create jobs and repeat jobs
- Hundreds of jobs can be created within minutes
- Jobs are priced correctly
- Things are done once
- There is traceability and visibility
Here’s what other haulage operators found when they digitised their Orders and Job Entry process:
“One of the biggest advantages has been the removal of manual processes and duplication of work. Everyone can see the benefits – with features such as on-line job entry, it means that we don’t have to re-enter information into different systems.” Jays Logistics
“We use our Mandata TMS for booking in jobs, which we then feed into our preferred pallet network for distribution; TPN Ireland Fortec, or Hazchem. We also use Mandata’s Customer Portal which enables customers to book their own jobs online, which is good. A few of our customers use it to book up to 30 jobs a day which saves us a lot of time in the office, because we don’t then have to enter the information onto the system and provides our customers with full job visibility.” Allen Logistics
“As the business developed, we recognised the need to invest in a comprehensive system to manage our contracts. By automating our manual processes, the Mandata TMS has helped to organise us, and has saved us considerable time and costs along the way. We’ve got full traceability on all of our jobs from the booking stage through to invoicing, and we can recall waste consignment notes and PODs quickly and easily as everything is contained within the one system.” Gap Waste Management
Blog post by:
