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Tyler Nickel FourKites headshotTyler NickelDirector, Product Marketing, FourKites

If you’re under a mandate to cut supply chain costs in the next year, find out how innovative companies are harnessing groundbreaking technology to root-out hidden cost pressures on their budgets.

One of the hardest challenges shippers face moving into their budget planning season is deciding how to do more with already strained resources. The worn out methods of shuffling your carrier mix and pouring over contracts and spreadsheets generates small wins – but as your operating year kicks off, unexpected costs quickly chip away at any headway gained. Without much ability to put your finger on where these costs are coming from, and ultimately how to avoid them, you could be stuck in the same cycle of blown budgets or underutilized assets year-after-year.

1. Take full control of inventory across your supply chain.

No more over-ordering to protect against stockouts, or lost sales as a result of running lean. Having accurate data on your lead times ensures you’re able to maintain service levels while avoiding having too much cash tied up in inventory.

With the FourKites tool you can compare what the planned lead time is for your inventory to the actual lead time, and when you put those two things together, you can see where there’s waste. Looking at the actual lead time with confidence is critical to driving lower inventory and improving cash flow.

– Tom France, VP Global Distribution, Logistics and Transportation at Trane Technologies

2. Be an expert in picking the right mode and service level for any scenario.

Expedites can be an attractive ‘easy button’ for your team when demand is hot, but did you know that’s not always the right choice? Visibility tools provide ample support for your teams to weigh their options and make the right decision at the lowest cost to your business.

Thanks to our success with FourKites we will be able to improve on-time delivery for our customers. We have more carrier performance reviews and more data-driven carrier performance reviews. We get upstream visibility into our suppliers and our production sites performance with that as well.

– Ferenc Polgar, Global Distribution Operational Excellence Lead, Bayer Crop Science ​

3. Make your yards the most efficient part of your supply chain.

For as complex as your supply chain is, your yard is a microcosm of handoffs and signals that require clear and concise execution. Yard Management Systems digitize the intricate processes that transition freight between your network and your warehouses to ensure accuracy and efficiency with minimal effort.

As a result of using FourKites Dynamic Yard and Appointment Manager, on-time delivery of our live unload shipments has improved by 10% due to the ability to secure the live load pick up in a timely manner.

– Tony Poole, Senior Transportation Manager, Kimberly-Clark

4. Keep your teams focused on your mission, not your misses.

With more competition than ever for employees, are you giving them the best tools to complete their tasks? Visibility platforms provide a safety net for performance, surfacing proactive alerts, putting solutions in their hands and backing them up with data to have more productive conversations with your stakeholders.

It used to be a lot of manual tracking. We were asking carriers for updates over email or calling them over the phone or checking websites… so many different avenues. With FourKites it’s all in one place. It’s just a lot easier to use. We even have our dealer management system updated to include direct links to the FourKites tracking, so it’s just a click away for our dealers and our customers.

– Chris Daniel, Logistics Analyst, Haworth

5. Stop giving providers free money, while becoming a shipper of choice.

You likely have contract terms with your freight providers dictating how long you can hold onto their assets. But with thousands of loads across your network, how can you keep tabs of their unique clocks counting down free time? Visibility tools give you the proactive alerts needed to keep you in good standing and away from accessorial charges.

To make the most of your time, you need to be able to sparse through the vast amounts of data you’re getting on a day-to-day basis and focus on what you really need to. FourKites allows you to manage by exception, rather than having to go through piece by piece of everything.

– Jason Wowk, Director of Operations, Arrowstream

While you can’t control everything, you can prevent an unexpected event from snowballing into a wrecking ball that shatters your budget. Making the right decisions at the right time to avoid catastrophe requires having all of the information in a single source of truth – real-time supply chain intelligence on a platform that offers visibility into everything, everywhere.


Hear from the experts

Can’t decide how to get started or what your use case is? Listen to our supply chain experts talk about these strategies or contact us at [email protected] to uncover your unique possibilities.

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