Tag Archives: performance

Improving Your Freight Costs – To begin

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Whether you are a large company or a small one, if you use freight carriers you need to be reviewing the price you are charged and the service you receive on a regular basis. Best case scenario: this would be happening with all your suppliers.

Carriers, as with most suppliers, will over time become complacent, the service you are receiving slowly gets behind the rest of the market and your costs as a percentage of sales are not as good as they once were.

A review of your suppliers and a comparison with the market will tell you how much more you could be saving; then again it could also show you how much you are already saving (although this happens a lot less).

In my blog, I will explain the steps you too can follow to improve your costs and service.

This process can be informal by just requesting a quote or formal, using a detailed RFP process. Either way it is about stopping the leakage, it is also about improving the relationship you have with your service providers. So until next time, start reviewing what information and history you have now or where you can get it from.

 

Reports – do they work for you?

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How often do you see reports that have little meaning or are too ponderous to use, this then makes the reports ineffective, simply because no-one wants to use them.  Then there are the reports that you have been instructed to put together and although they are useful, they have little relevance to your own position or function.  What you need are reports that are concise, relevant and effective.

To design a good report, list the minimum information that is required to manage that part of your business you are reporting on.  Next, find what is the required data to compile this information. And lastly, source the data – where does it come from. Preferably, most of this data is already contained in spreadsheets (or can be imported into one easily).

Now review the source, include other fields that will beef up your report, but ensure it adds value to the report and is not just filler.  If done in excel the report should also include a tab that has the data in pictorial format – graphs! This is where KPIs can be viewed and valid assessments made.

A good report will show trends, both positive and negative, as well as status.  It will also be timely, easy to produce and even easier to read.  This then will allow you to see what is happening, or has the potential to happen, and take the appropriate action.

For all the SMBs and Operations people out there, I have written a brief on ‘Focus’ that may help you design your own reports on Freight, Inventory and Staffing (Operations reporting 101).

Note:
DATA – is raw detail, usually one line of data contains information related to one transaction. Doesn’t tell you much.
INFORMATION: an assortment/combination of data, providing information and trends in simple format.
REPORT: Information in a format that tells a story. Big picture stuff.