Rising transportation costs, a truck driver shortage, and carrier capacity crunches are all creating new complexities for shippers in the current operating environment.
Add a persistent labor shortage, the e-commerce boom, and the need for robust consumer data protections to the equation, and the situation becomes even more difficult for the typical company to navigate.
With more consumers buying everything from groceries to apparel to home improvement goods online, shippers are reimagining how they connect with, deliver to, and engage with these modern buyers.
Most successful organizations are exploding at the seams in terms of order volumes versus where they were just 12 to 24 months ago. Many of them are turning to automation to handle that growth in volume, knowing that if they lack the systems to be able to scale up, they’re going to have a hard time handling the velocity of the volume of outgoing orders.
In the absence of a multi-carrier shipping system that’s based in the Cloud, companies are forced to rely on a combination of disparate transportation management solutions, e-mail, phone calls, and spreadsheets to manage their global parcel networks. And while they may have sufficed when order volume was low, the 44% uptick in e-commerce orders in 2020 pushed many of these antiquated solutions to their breaking points.