For shippers worried about the pressure to green up their shipping operations, and the associated costs and resources required, there’s good news. It’s not only the right thing to do for the earth but can be good for your business as well. Here actions you can take now to improve your sustainable shipping.
Shippo, a provider of shipping software, has created an API integration with major ecommerce platform company Shopify, making its tools natively available to millions of Shopify merchants, a process that is being accelerated by a major investment from Shopify. Much of the initial focus is on expanding in European markets.
Peel-off stacks, dedicated piles of 50 containers or more, are a great port congestion solution if you’re a mega shipper like Walmart, but less so if you’re an SMB. But now smaller players can have freight consolidated to create peel-off stacks. Bryn Heimbeck of Trade Tech talks about a pilot project at the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach.
Abe Eshkenazi, CEO of the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM), said organizations need to take more of a long-term, systemic view vs. short-term fixes in response to a crisis. In this MCM podcast, Eshkenazi stresses the need for better visibility to read demand signals, and consideration of upstream/downstream effects. of efforts in any one node.
Due to the complexity of freight shipping operations, many businesses that move large quantities of goods may have preconceived notions about LTL or believe common myths about why LTL isn’t right for them. By and large, these myths may be exactly the opposite of the how a well-organized and prepared 3PL handles LTL shipments.
Major 3PL and freight forwarder Geodis has signed a five-year lease on an air freighter to deliver extra capacity for its shipper clients heading into the peak season as space continues to tighten up on air freight due to the ongoing delays in ocean freight out of Asia.
The carrier capacity crunch is real, and these LTL capacity issues aren’t going anywhere soon. The only answer for shippers to manage their transportation is to turn to dynamic solutions and lean on technology that is rapidly evolving to meet evolving supply chain and transportation network needs.
UPS has ended a freeze on earned discount tiers based on large shipping volume drops caused by COVID-19 lockdowns, with some shippers seeing cost increases in the 10% to 30% range as they suddenly dropped two or three tiers, consultants and shippers report. The freeze ended as the lockdown effects are long over.
While the ripple effect of massive supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic continues to affect imports and transit times across industries, a massive reshoring of production and distribution to North America is not likely, according to a recent report from The Economist’s intelligence unit.
Ahead of the upcoming holiday season with its expected surge beyond the “perpetual peak” we’ve been seeing since March of last year, UPS is again issuing surcharges across its services, hitting major shippers particularly hard in a tiered system based on volume.