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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
i2 Strategic Network Design and Analysis can provide a set of tools to support intelligent decision making at every stage of the supply chain, from raw materials procurement to finished goods distribution.
Supply Chain Visibility pulls timely
transaction data from multiple systems,
and organizes it into a coherent global
view of order, inventory, and shipment
activity. This view includes exceptions
and alerts, so that potential problems
can be identified and solved before they
affect performance.
i2 Transportation Bid Collaboration provides a suite of tools for the periodic negotiation of transportation rates. It combines an optimization engine, a web-based workflow, and a bidding tool into a single solution for negotiating and awarding transportation contracts.
Transportation Modeling and Analysis is part of an end-to-end solution for the planning, execution, and management of the entire transportation life cycle. This solution is designed to enable an organization to better utilize and manage an entire transportation network, as well as reduce costs while improving transport performance.
i2 Transportation Planning and Management can offer the tools needed to optimize and execute shipments, proactively monitor exceptions, and manage match pay and auto pay settlements, as well as provide analytical performance management for transport activities.
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