Turning Shipping Into a Model of Efficiency and Simplicity

For distributors and other companies that regularly ship products to customers, managing shipping to meet customer expectations is a business-critical undertaking. Depending on how your shipping department operates, shipping can contribute to customer satisfaction and drive organizational productivity—or cause inefficiencies and incur high costs without adequate returns. In this article, we highlight how solutions from Sikich partner RateLinx in integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 can eliminate needless costs, create shipping efficiency, and fuel great customer experiences.

Are your shipping operations in need of modernization?

We often hear that many distribution companies share common concerns. For all of them, the cost of labor, equipment, services, and facilities associated with shipping absorbs a large share of their budgets. It can be challenging to manage shipping operations such as less-than-truckload (LTL) or full-truckload (FTL) shipping to be cost- and resource-efficient as well as timely. Key process elements like printing labels or packing slips can turn into constraints that bleed inefficiency across the business. When companies use UPS, USPS, DHL, FedEx, and other services for parcel shipping, their ability to control expenses depends to a high degree on how well they can analyze costs and negotiate advantageous rates with competing service providers. Inefficiencies in shipping processes and team roles as well as skills gaps can jeopardize the quality of customer experiences and cause escalating financial losses.

Many distribution companies rely on a variety of software tools to manage shipping and logistics operations. Errors easily happen when workers have to navigate multiple or hard-to-use software systems to enter information, requiring resolution and lengthening processes. Transparency and reportability are low when technological complexity makes it difficult to gain a full view of shipping processes and rates. Outcomes can include customers experiencing tardy or inaccurate communications, receiving their orders later than expected, getting the wrong items, or receiving wrong quantities. Limited, disparate, or outmoded software tools can exacerbate the challenges of shipping and result in a financial, productivity, and reputational sinkhole.

Proven solutions for transforming shipping

Modern technology can help transform shipping and other operations, allowing your distribution business to deliver what customers want, accurately and on time. Building on over three decades of supply chain experience and technology development, RateLinx’s solutions, ShipLinx TMS, and RateLinx Freight Audit and Pay, have been named in over 40 Gartner reports, reinforcing RateLinx’s status as a leader in transportation and freight management innovation By optimizing and automating shipping processes with ShipLinx TMS and integrating the software with Microsoft Dynamics 365, RateLinx client Power Sales and Advertising has:

• Saved $78,000 worth of labor hours.
• Reduced shipping label printing time by 83 percent.
• Cut print labor costs by $200,000.

Sikich integrates the RateLinx technology with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, the widely adopted ERP system, on a secure, scalable Azure cloud platform. Together, Sikich and RateLinx teams help clients modernize their shipping operations with greater flexibility and efficiency. In a recent webinar, logistics and ERP experts from Sikich explored the potential advantages of this approach with Shannon Vaillancourt, the RateLinx CEO.

How ShipLinx TMS and Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP work together

Dynamics 365 powers all business processes in one coherent, transparent environment. ShipLinx TMS receives customer, sales, and order data from the ERP system and automatically posts shipping updates to it. Sales, customer support, finance managers, and logistics teams can rely on a current and complete set of data for managing the business and serving customers. Both Microsoft and RateLinx publish regular updates and enhancements for their solutions and distribute them automatically.

Both ShipLinx TMS and Dynamics 365 can report on the metrics and KPIs companies use to manage their shipping and other operations. Sikich consultants can enable full visibility in a range of dashboards and reporting vehicles. Shipping teams using ShipLinx TMS work with an intuitive, easily learned interface, without needing to navigate the ERP system.

Similar to Dynamics 365, you can set up ShipLinx TMS to reflect your business rules for shipping products and managing exceptions, thereby eliminating arbitrary or poorly informed decision-making and ensuring that the best of your organization’s expertise guides shipping processes. You can modify, add, and discard rules as requirements change.

Automations simplify and accelerate shipping

Automations enabled by ShipLinx TMS accelerate shipping processes and avoid costly errors that can easily cause delays and financial waste in manually handled workflows. You can minimize the risk of error-related customer dissatisfaction and make better use of employee time. Companies using ShipLinx TMS can run shipping with smaller teams, slash the time team leads and managers spend addressing errors, and reduce the need for highly skilled people throughout the process. With automation and workflow prompts, even shipping and warehouse generalists without special training can be productive and support fast-moving operations. As the shipping workflow proceeds, ShipLinx TMS can send automatic alerts to business managers or customers to provide updates or keep them apprised of exceptional conditions to be addressed, for example, larger-than-expected weights.

Label printing at the point of picking

A Sikich created feature for ShipLinx TMS makes it possible to automatically print labels not just at the shipping station, but also, for instance, at forklifts or hand trucks used in picking items. This change eliminates many touches and some travel of the goods in your facilities and reduces the dependency on staff and printing capabilities at shipping stations. By simplifying label printing this way, a large distributor managed to accelerate the speed of the entire shipping process ten-fold.

Better returns from spending on shipping services

You can configure ShipLinx TMS to manage shipping through your preferred services provider, or let RateLinx technology evaluate and recommend the service that makes best sense for your business and its customers. With RateLinx Freight Audit and Pay, you can analyze spending on shipping services and model adjustments to reduce it while maintaining service-level commitments. RateLinx customers have generated substantial cost savings with this capability.

ShipLinx TMS provides automatic updates whenever shipping services adjust their rates. That makes it easier to invoice customers the right amounts in a timely manner and can contribute to shipping generating revenue instead of running exclusively as a cost center.

Two leading organizations team on your behalf

Sikich and RateLinx share a collaborative, individualized approach to engaging with clients. Sikich and RateLinx teams apply their skills to meet unique business requirements without complicating the technology environment, prioritizing simplicity and a superior experience quality for system users and customers. Both Dynamics 365 and the RateLinx solutions are highly extensible and flexible in accommodating various, simultaneous shipping practices, business models, and organizational changes. We involve clients’ transportation teams from the very beginning of the engagement, so no valuable insight regarding current processes and improvement opportunities falls by the wayside. Transportation team participation is also invaluable in validating the operation of an integrated ERP and RateLinx implementation and ensures rapid adoption following go-live.

Fast implementations with a short time-to-value

By taking the time to understand your specific goals and challenges, we can apply proven, effective process standards and technology configurations to achieve the outcomes you aim for. Once Sikich consultants prepare your data environment and document your shipping processes with their granular requirements and improvement opportunities, a deployment of ShipLinx TMS can easily be completed within 30 business days. In concert with your leadership and business groups, we manage technical change to be nondisruptive to employees and their workflows.

ShipLinx TMS is an approved ISV in our HEADSTART methodology, which eases and accelerates system deployments with industry-best practices and standardized processes. That will further reduce the time-to-benefit for both ShipLinx TMS and Dynamics 365 and allow distributors to more easily reach their shipping performance and customer experience objectives.

Next steps

If you want to bring greater efficiency, accuracy, and productivity to shipping in your business, consider the opportunities of an integrated solution comprising Microsoft Dynamics 365 and RateLinx technology. To find out more about the potential advantages and to get started, you can:

• Contact the Sikich team.
• Watch the Sikich and RateLinx webinar “3 Ways TMS Automation with MS Dynamics 365 Drives Value” on the Sikich site or on YouTube.
• Find out about Sikich ERP consulting services.