Trucking onto the Profitable Highway
Blog: Kofax - Smart Process automation
We often believe working harder will yield success, but as the pace of competition and technology increases, it’s become more difficult.
All those repetitive and manual tasks completed throughout the work day add up, quickly. Compound those tasks across your organization and all your employees, you might just realize the vast inefficiency that is hurting your bottom line and growth of the company.
Perhaps it’s time to work smarter, not harder. And while the thought of automation can you give reason to pause, it’s an opportunity to improve your organization’s efficiency and profitability.
Within transportation and logistics, there are tremendous pressures from both customers and freight haulers which are cutting into already thin margins. Operational efficiency is the utmost importance and any amount of manual work shrinks profitability.
Load It Up
- Wouldn’t be nice if there was a way to research loads faster, like by about 9,000% and win more business?
- And it would help your Account Receivables Department to get payments 65% faster than it does now? Getting those payments faster would be nice.
- What if a customer is disputing a payment due to an error?
- What about exceeding service level agreements (SLAs) with your top customers?
- Best of all, not having errors due to manual keying would prevent that painful call to your customer of a mistake made. Not to mention the costs associated with it.
Put the Robot in the Driver’s Seat
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses automation to literally drive your existing applications and process activities just like one of your employees. The “software robots” automate the collection, transformation, and delivery of data in your organization regardless of where it resides or where it needs to go. The automated software robots handle all the tedious work no one in your organization really likes doing, and when the work is not getting done it only puts more pressure on your customer service reps and the company. For the overworked IT person, software robots are easy to design with no coding and deploy in a few days, which means IT can focus on the other key digital transformation projects that management is pressing to have done.
Here are just a few areas within your transportation and logistics organization that RPA can transform:
- Order shipment scheduling and tracking
- Account receivable and credit collections
- Automated bidding for new business
- Fleet maintenance and warranty repair tracking
Peering through Your Portal
Partner and customer Portals can be a touchy subject as so many of your employees spend endless hours entering in information and printing and filing reports. While the portals benefit the customer and partner, they often become a drag on productivity for your customer service reps as they are required to frequently post and update information into these portals which takes them away from more customer centric activities that require a human touch.
Don’t Look Back
Typical reporting and analytics simply show what has happened, in the past. How will that help your organization? Well, it doesn’t. Your organization, your industry moves so quickly, it’s imperative to know what is going on, now. You need the type of insight that provides near-real time reporting and analytics to see how your processes are performing (and when they are not). Plus this type of process intelligence also provides information as to how to fix the issue so that it doesn’t happen again.
Interested in learning more about RPA? Download your free copy of Strategies to Build Efficiencies into Your Supply Chain white paper.
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