Your transportation plans won’t always work as expected due to factors such as increased production, road closures, and unforeseen disruptions. When these happen, you'll need more than one option.
A flexible transportation network gives you more options, helps you switch transportation providers, allows you to change routes, and respond faster when transportation needs change. This way, you can keep up with production schedules, control transportation costs, and deliver on time.
You can only build this flexibility when you identify weaknesses in your transportation network and create a backup plan before you need it.
Assess Transportation Needs and Identify Network Gaps
To identify network gaps and build a flexible supply chain, you must trace how freight moves through the existing transportation network.
- Map out how it moves between production facilities, suppliers, distribution centers, and customers.
- Study shipment volumes, modes of transportation, transit times, movement costs, and carrier performance.
- Pay close attention to shipments that depend on only one route, supplier, or carrier. These shipments are potentially at risk, as small delays can cause a big problem.
- Compare normal operations with periods of increased demand and production- networks that perform normally during normal operations may struggle during peak seasons.
Once you identify the weak points, your transportation team or logistics service provider can improve carrier coverage and create more backups to address gaps.
Diversify Carriers and Transportation Modes
Depending on one transportation mode or carrier is dangerously inadequate for freight movement, especially for critical freight. It can cause delays, missed deliveries, and price increases. When manufacturers have backup carriers and transportation modes, they can easily reassign freight to another mode when their current carrier faces operational problems or difficulties.
Companies can use primary and secondary carriers based on capacity, service, cost, and location. Alternative carriers should be ready, especially during periods of increased demand. Match shipments to the right transportation mode, and use truckload for larger shipments, less-than-truckload (LTL) for smaller loads, and intermodal for long-distance freight.
Shared transportation risks also need to be addressed, as some manufacturers still face risk when multiple carriers use the same port, border, and freight corridor. Build alternative routes and transportation options and prevent a single disruption from affecting the entire network.
Build Flexibility Into Routing and Capacity Planning
A fixed routing and capacity plan can reduce your transportation teams' options when production changes or during downtime. This fixed plan can lead to late deliveries, last-minute decisions, and higher delivery costs.
You can prevent this problem by creating backup plans from the start instead of making last-minute decisions. Identify backup paths for important shipments and make sure transportation teams know which transportation providers they can use when the original plan no longer works.
Use past delivery volumes alongside production forecasts and seasonal demand. If a launch or busy production period is coming up, secure additional capacity before goods volumes increase.
Transportation teams also need to know when to make a change, for instance, when transportation providers are losing capacity, delaying deliveries, or are dealing with service failure. These reasons should be enough to prompt directing a shipment to another provider or mode.
Production teams can also help by sharing schedule changes early. This early notice gives transportation planners more time to adjust deliveries instead of reacting after delivery has already been delayed.
Use Technology and Data to Improve Network Visibility
You need real-time visibility into freight movements so you can respond quickly to potential delivery delays and route disruptions. When data is scattered across spreadsheets, carrier portals, and internal systems, it becomes harder for your transportation teams to understand it and turn it into insights that help them respond quickly to disruptions.
Use tools like TMS, GPS, Telematics, and carrier data to give your transportation teams clear views of delivery problems. These tools also give your transportation teams more time to respond to possible delivery delays and prevent transportation problems from affecting production. Integrating your TMS with your ERP and other technology systems is essential to creating visibility that empowers timely decision-making. By combining real-time data with historical metrics, you can identify recurring problems and work to improve them.
You cannot prevent every transportation disruption, but you can decide how your transportation operations will respond when one occurs. Disruptions such as severe weather, carrier failures, port closures, road closures, and system outages can all interrupt the movement of your goods.
Start by analyzing a common disruption most likely to affect your transportation network. Ask yourself: What will we do if this disruption happens? Identify backup transportation providers and alternative routes to use when the original plan no longer works.
Train your transportation, production, and procurement teams to know when to use these backup plans. This helps your teams respond quickly and coordinate their decisions instead of figuring out what to do after a disruption has already affected network operations. Also, test your backup plans regularly to ensure they still work when you need them.
You cannot avoid every transport problem. But you can decide how prepared you are when one happens. Partner with a 3PL that specializes in transportation, work with more than one transportation provider, prepare alternative routes, improve visibility into your deliveries, and have backup plans your teams know how to use.
The goal is not to predict every disruption. It ensures that a delayed shipment, an unavailable provider, or a closed route does not stop your goods from moving.
Nick Fryer is the Vice President Of Marketing at Sheer Logistics.
