Transportation and Logistics

The transportation and distribution world is a rapidly changing landscape marked by unprecedented complexity. Increased global trade makes logistics supply chains even longer and more dynamic, and customer expectations continue to rise. Whether shipping from Chicago or Shanghai, companies must be able to collaborate more effectively with their key trading partners—carriers, suppliers, or customers—to drive maximum efficiencies while delivering world-class service. Consequently, organizations must consider these business processes more strategically and look for more refined and adaptable closed-loop solutions.

i2 solutions for transportation and distribution have been designed and proven to empower transportation as a strategic enterprise by enabling industry best practices in the areas of design, procurement, planning, execution, and visibility. These solutions consistently create quantifiable value by synchronizing those critical transportation and distribution processes across multiple modes, enterprises, and borders, while driving optimal operating efficiencies and greater service performance.

Key challenges faced by the transportation and distribution industry can include:

• Rising profitability pressures including increased fuel costs, driving hours-of-service regulations, and new regulatory mandates driven by security, which can have a large impact on profit margin
• Severe capacity issues including a shortage of drivers and equipment and an imbalance in freight flows driven by global sourcing
• Greater need for inbound and outbound freight visibility and control on a global basis
• Increasing customer expectations for transportation performance including expectations of 99.9% on-time delivery performance, reduced damage-in-transit, flexibility and ability to adapt to order changes, and order and shipment visibility

Traditionally, transportation and distribution companies focused on:

• Short-term cost reduction
• Adversarial shipper-carrier relations
• Distributed planning and execution
• Manual processes with minimal automation
• Operational silos across inbound and outbound transportation management
• Reactive approach to managing exceptions and service disruptions
• Cost-centered business model

Today, transportation and distribution companies must focus on:

• Emerging transportation practices
• Sustainable cost-service optimization
• Collaborative shipper-carrier partnerships
• Centralized planning, localized execution
• Integrated inbound, outbound, and inter-facility transportation management
• Proactive and automated monitoring and resolution of exceptions and service disruptions
• Profit-center business model that can be leveraged as a strategic weapon