Global Insights in the Transport & Logistics business
Increasing competition and reducing profit margins are creating significant challenges of growth in the transportation & logistics industry. The global transportation market valuation is $700billion. The rising competition is motivating businesses to find ways that are effectively increasing profit margin by 6-10%. Despite a substantial increment in the margin, the transport business found it challenging to invest their income in technology.
Thus, only 5% of the total revenue gets invested back into technology. Most companies generally invest in building a digital interface for customer experience. Not investing in complete digitization of business (while searching for futuristic growth) is a blunder that a majority in the industry commit. Counter the lower profit margin; businesses should focus on adapting simple growth hacks that can be implemented quickly for higher profitability.
Incorporating Automation in Transport Business
Market proven growth hacks to transform your transport business
Focus on data-driven strategies & planning to save millions in Expenses
Data is an essential resource in today’s time. You can use effective technologies like big data analytics for making a foolproof business plan for the near future. Using data-driven insights and interpreting the data doesn’t cost excessively. It has proven the benefits of helping you build better strategies and making reliable, feasible, and easily executable plans that help in sustaining the transport business. One can make use of your existing sales record, digital record of customer engagement data, efficiency parameters, and performance metrics to measure the actual performance of any transportation business.
These data-driven insights are capable of not only streamlining the business side of your company but also know your customers in a much better way. You can also consider customer feedback by quantifying their responses and ratings. It can help you exactly know how the company should function and what standards of performance are required to serve the customers on merit.
Logistics business leader UPS trucks don’t turn left because their big data analytics insights suggested that trucks turning left consume more fuel, cost more. As a result, only 10% of the turns left, and it helps them save 10M gallon fuel, 20000 tonnes of less carbon and deliver 350,000 more packages even after reducing the truck fleet by 1100.
Research & implementation of digital solutions for cost-effective expansion of transportation business
All transportation businesses might look similar and compete for an overlapping market share. However, their core USPs and special abilities to handle customers significantly differ. Most major transportation and logistics companies are investing a fair share of their income in digital solutions. One can take a competitive edge by researching the most critical requirements of a business. Offering a unique customer experience might be an understatement as a growth hack but can take a business far ahead in numbers.
Using the latest technology like blockchain can help you build highly productive and massively impactful comprehensive digital solutions. You can make the most out of your investment by using a simple hack to research the most relevant technology that you can use. Among all, blockchains are capable of helping you to hack the growth rate of your transport business.
Logistic business leader Maersk has recently tested the blockchain enables a digital platform for managing all the cargo-related data. The company reported that the customs department and US security organizations were conveniently able to access the cargo-related data and yet perform highly secured international shipping. Using a combination of the latest technologies can prove to be a very efficient growth hack for your business.
A small investment in the Automation of business can change the entire game
The canvas of complete Automation might look vivid, but it should realize that they are highly finance-intensive operations. It requires a lot of testing and planning before implementation and all that should be firmly backed by deep investor pockets. However, you can hack the growth of your transportation business by handpicking the most repetitive tasks that you can automate through a digital solution. It is not always costly and can help you make better profits with an efficient business process.
There is a visionary growth-centric transportation business that had done in-depth research to frame critical requirements like multiple order acceptance, real-time updates of orders in the queue, Google map integration, barcoding, and chat management. They knew that they had to invest much manual labor for converting the hard copy of the database for building digital records of all the orders. Further, it had to convert into a consolidated database. They hired an innovative mobile development company that helped them automate their process of digitizing their hard copy database records into the digital database. The logistics business had its growth for more considerable success by figuring out what day exactly need to automate.
Know how supply chain execution can ease your business operation via TMS (Transport Management System), WMS (Warehouse Management System) and more in our ‘Transport & Logistics Industry Growth’ blog series:
What Does Logistics Industry Trends Mean To Your Business? Part – II
Investment in a customized solution for cost-cutting
Transportation businesses can easily cut down the overall survival cost of their business. It can be done by skillfully optimizing the vehicle, container utilization. Properly documenting the real-time update of all the ongoing logistic orders is a great solution. It helps you know which containers and trucks are free and waiting for the next order at a particular point in time. The nearest load orders can be assigned to them and reduce the cost of dedicatedly sending logistic vehicles for serving those orders. A robust, performance-driven, and business-friendly digital solution for the transportation industry can help you successfully implement this highly effective growth hack.
Prediction of future management & sales operations
Imagine, if you were able to accurately predict the near future requirements of containers, logistics vehicles, and the transportation resources required in the longer run. Moreover, if you can predict the next batch of your company’s sales pattern, it helps you much more profitable and efficiently serve your clients on merit.
Making dedicated use of artificial intelligence and machine learning can help you exercise predictive machine learning models. These models can predict the exact number of vehicles, type of vehicles, and the container that required by your company in the upcoming stipulated time. If a business owner knows what their exact requirement of logistic resources is, they can dynamically hire or lease logistics, transport resources and cut down costs in the most efficient manner. IBM Watson is a similarly empowering business.
Carry out “intelligent operations.”
The technology-driven growth hack can help you streamline your logistics and related warehousing operations like a pro. You can use a cohesive, interconnected network of IoT enabled sensors that keep tracking data related to weather, outside temperature, threats in proximity, load-bearing capacity. If your containers, trucks, and smaller logistic vehicles provide IoT components, they can interact with each other and help businesses perform a data-driven decision-making process.
It can help you make critical decisions like moving specific bulk cargos in adverse weather conditions, risk of accidents due to massive container proximity, the temperature outside, and humidity. It can also help you calculate the total transportation time with all possible logistic vehicle options available in your company. You can master the king of all growth hacks by using IoT and making the most out of your business.
The Conclusion
Implementing growth hacks for streamlining a transportation business is a great idea, but there should be certain aspects that need to be kept in mind. Any growth hack for the transportation industry should carefully analyze for a mandatory financial burden which it creates by incrementing the survival cost of the company. There can be chances that there is a foolproof business hack which ascertains profits, but you may not be analyzing how much money it is going to require in the longer run.
Always assist this investment return trade-off before taking any decisions of skilling or tweaking the business process of your transportation company. Transportation is undergoing a transcendental change with a string of technology applications rapidly maturing shortly, and we can expect better-conceptualized businesses and improved digital experience in the coming years.