When everything goes our way, it feels like magic. A customer gets inside a store and finds exactly what they need neatly stacked on shelves. Or if they purchase online, they can get their order safely kept on their porch one or two days later.
In myriad places across the globe, people have become accustomed to such remarkable conveniences. But when the supply chains are disrupted by global or natural events, suddenly the magic seems like it was all smoke and mirrors.
Supply chain disruptions create dreadful and uncertain times for businesses and consumers alike. They also point out the gaps that organizations experience while keeping up with customer demands. They also draw attention to their supply chain tendencies that they are otherwise not aware of when everything is operating smoothly.
These disruptions are also impacting companies’ freight capacity and triggering shipping rates that further add to the complexity of the current logistics and transportation industry.
The question is, how can these logistics and transportation companies beat their competitors and best serve their customers?
Enterprises that still rely on legacy systems for driving the business forward fail to handle the disruptions, sacrificing agility, visibility, and control. In turn, they experience a fragmented B2B integration environment.
In the current logistics and manufacturing environment, if a company is dealing with broken B2B integrations, it’s likely that they will not be able to harness the true potential of customer data and meet or exceed their expectations. What they need is a modernized platform that enables them gain more agility and flexibility than they’ve ever experienced.
The answer lies in self-service integration technology.
Self-service integration platforms enable business users integrate customer data and use insightful information to meet their growing demands and expectations. These low-code solutions enable every business user (non-technical ones) to take the onus of building integrations without weeks of coding. Core processes associated with fulfilment can be automated, which eliminates the need for manual interventions in processes such as load-tender-to-invoice. It handles disruptions happening in the long-haul trucking industry by supporting real-time and batch transactions, enabling them to extend the benefits to new partners and customers, leveraging their integration environments to deliver on the promise of increasing capacity, eliminating empty miles, and cutting down risk.
Related eBook: Transform Your Business with Self-Service Integration
How Can Logistics and Transportation Companies Savor Benefits Through Self-Service?
Supply chain ecosystems can leverage a self-service integration platform to handle voluminous data, in various formats, to make important business decisions with precision and speed. The problem of data silos almost minimizes to a minimum as all the data is accessed instantly. Plus, giving the power to the business users allows IT to focus on more high-value tasks. Here are some benefits that these solutions offer:
Faster Customer Data Onboarding
Self-service-powered platforms enable business users:
- Onboard new trading partners in minutes instead of months, turning it faster by up to 80%.
- Meet any customer request or requirement by empowering any-to-any integrations and retaining flexible protocol connectivity.
Accelerate Transparency, Greater Operational Visibility
With user-friendly dashboards and intuitive screens, business users can track customer data and create connections quickly. It allows users:
- Monitor and track B2b operations.
- Receive automated alerts with the event and non-event-based notifications.
Accelerate Load Tender and Advance Ship Notification (ASN) Processes with Backend Applications
Self-service integration platforms automate processes like load tender and ASN without compromising their effectiveness.
- Establish a connection with any transportation management system (TMS), ERP, warehouse management system (WMS), and other back-end applications.
- Build automated API integrations and route EDI transactions.
Delight More Customers
Customers’ needs are met faster as business users can rapidly process their data using pre-built application connectors and shared templates.
- Provide hands-on control to quickly troubleshoot and avoid integration failures.
- Allow users access information related to business processes.
Increase Productivity
By enabling non-techies to build integrations, companies can free their IT and technical teams and allow them to take part in more important tasks.
- Empower business users perform onboarding and integration of data without complexity.
- Put IT on a governance role, driving innovation and growth.