Why should you outsource your freight?
Small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) may wonder why they should outsource their freight to a freight forwarder. Because courier services can be booked online, most small companies relegate the task to their sales people or administrative assistants. It’s not any different than posting a letter, right?
While this sounds reasonable on its face, in practice it can get you into trouble. The truth is that the laws of international trade are constantly evolving, and if you don’t have dedicated staff devoted to managing your freight, you can end up with fines, delays, or even having your goods seized by customs. It’s like asking your operations team to manage your bookkeeping. Not only does it require expertise to do correctly, but if it is done incorrectly you won’t realize until it is too late. And when that happens, your staff will be distracted from their real job while they try to resolve the problem.
The rules of the freight industry are not intuitive and take time to understand. I remember explaining the concept of volumetric weight to my husband, who did not know the industry. “Kilograms are not a unit of volume!” he argued. In science they aren’t, but in the freight industry they are. On top of that, whoever manages your freight will need to navigate a myriad of options and fees, such as special charges, fuel surcharges, pricing tiers for heavy packages and different rules for different modes of transport.
In our globalised world, technology and communications are evolving faster than the freight industry is adapting.
We believe that we can harness this technology to transform and modernize the freight industry. The obstacles in our way are the disparate, outdated technologies currently in use by the freight industry and its reluctance to update its modes of operation.
Our goal is to create an interactive system powerful enough to automatically handle multimodal freight and flexible enough to support manual interaction when required.
This novel online tool will be useful in a wide range of markets and will be adaptable to many forms of communication, including online interfaces, APIs, and email.
CEO COLUMN