4 steps to innovate your freight forwarder
Created on January 6, 2021 | Last updated on November 18, 2021 at 03:06 pm
In this article you will get:
To think and practice innovation is fundamental for the future success of a freight forwarder. The forwarding industry, along with the logistics sector demands a lot of resources that could use technology to improve the business and optimize the process, therefore innovate your freight forwarder.
But, many freight forwarders still don’t use technology in their favor, and for that reason, the process takes longer to be executed and for many times ends up with a big delay.
Thinking about the improvement of the logistics industry, freight forwarders companies should start setting their mindset to technology in order to make the business more efficient.
Tips to innovate your freight forwarder company
- Know your partner’s needs:
Before implementing any changes, talk to your client to understand their needs, this way you will know what is really relevant for them and will be able to create a successful solution.
After having a conversation with your partners and understanding what has real value to them, start thinking about a solution and the best way to implement it. Have in mind that what you are going to offer as a solution has to make the partner’s life easier.
- Talk to people from outside the forwarder industry:
Don’t worry, we are not crazy! Talking with people that are not from the logistics and freight forwarding industry is a great way to have insights and start improving. Since they really don’t know much about the sector they will question some methods that for you can be obvious and that you have never thought about optimizing.
- Technological innovation:
Now that you know all your partner’s pain and the best way to solve them, you must start the next step, technological innovation. Creating a technological solution for your forwarder company will help you to increase the company’s performance and ensure better and faster results.
In our conversation with Jarell Habets, Founder & CEO of Shypple, we saw that most freight forwarders still use a spreadsheet and emails to manage their shipments which can delay the cargo by one day.
Watch our conversation with Jarell Habets and know more about the freight forwarder technological industry.
When we think about the cargo delay due to the usage of spreadsheets we also think of a solution, and that is Parnity, the digital logistics network offers an add-on feature that gives forwarders the power to manage their forwarder partners in a single place.
Parnity’s management system forwarders are allowed to have all their partners in a single place, organize them in a board by country, city, modal, service, or whatever makes sense. Along with ranking partners to know which are the best options to quote in a country, analyze them to improve partnerships, and share it with the whole team.
- Faster validation and continuous improvement:
Having continuous processes of fast trials is fundamental for innovation to keep happening.
The innovating process involves the implementation of new ideas or solutions through the forwarder organization, your partners, and clients.
Keep validating the new ideas and solutions your team and your partners suggest, after all, they are the ones that are going to be using your technological solution.
The main point of this method is to assemble a process of experiments that have a hypothesis, observation, measurement, and learning.
Where do I start?
After validating your hypothesis with your forwarder clients, partners and staff, it’s time to start changing your forwarder company. But how to know what to do first?
Well, once you have talked to your partners and your team you will be able to know their main needs, so that is where you should start. After resolving the bigger problem is time to go to the next one and so on.
The most effective way to always be innovating your freight forwarder is to prioritize the partner’s and team’s needs into what is critical and what isn’t. This way you will have a sequence of the steps to take.
Remember that you should focus on your partners and clients, but also on your team because they also need tools to improve the work.