A leading manufacturer of snack foods in North America recently made great strides in simplifying the communication process with their carriers. With typical scheduling systems, when a manufacturer wants to plan the pickup times and alert the carriers, they may still struggle with identifying which carrier will be available to pick up on that given date and time. They were relying on manual processes - like phone calls and emails - in order to confirm the proper carrier.
Despite having prearranged rates with carriers, it can still be a cumbersome task of assigning loads to carriers. This snack food and cookie manufacturer had been a C3 Reservations customer for 2 years when they came to us with the following problem statement:
- In order to allocate a customer load to a carrier, the transportation team needs to email the carrier all the load properties and wait for an acknowledgement (or refusal) from them. Since the information is already in the appointment properties, could C3 Reservations automatically email the information?
- Tracking the unresponsive carriers was cumbersome and stressful. Some took for granted the load was acknowledged and others disregarded (forgot) to respond to the email. Could C3 Reservations make these demands available on the carrier portal for greater visibility?
- The risk of not having a carrier pickup on-time a customer order due to miscommunications is stressful, especially when the department is more than one person and you require checks and balances for what is considered a simple process - simply having a carrier acknowledge a load! A constant distraction during the day from other tasks.
Download the case study to see how C3 Solutions streamlined the carrier assignments process.