Logistics solution to be called green for the prospective approaches towards increasing energy efficiency, productivity, safety society in terms of transportation or distribution of goods with lesser operational cost. More precisely attention held on to the process optimization by implementing technology begin from packaging, inventory, transshipment, warehousing, delivery of goods.

How many logistics service providers think about preparing an Eco-friendly environment of providing services that is undefined but they are yet to completely develop a proper green logistics work flow through which reduce cost of freight, fast delivery and client satisfaction would have maintained.

Despite spreading awareness about the environment friendly logistics services companies strive to maintain such work flow for competition and fast pace of business. While demand raises and business begin growing only thing need to necessarily meet is effective service, now issues turn up to follow the usual procedure to set up Eco-friendly environment when companies try to reduce environmental impacts in terms of its transportation’s infrastructure, modes, and traffic flows. Let’s discuss points of implementing strategies with an objective to reduce cost and improve service.

An unresolved issue seems to be reliability, if companies are likely to go for Eco-friendly transportation mode which would be least reliable in terms of providing last mile delivery services, lack of damages and safety.

Timing is a primary point of every logistics system, service count on time and reducing time and improving services having such environmental factors is a real challenge. Recently money for service value has been acknowledged and encouraged in mostly urban areas such as door-to-door services and just-in-time services are preferably implemented in the market which in return lead to an increase in environmental impacts. These sort of demands require heavy vehicle transportation or air transportation which burn fuel results pollution and high cost.

Logistics companies are putting effort to reduce cost by reducing inventories where warehouse charges and maintenance can be curbed. However, this strategy also yields more transit inventories and more use of vehicles on road, thus producing more pollution, traffic congestion, transition cost.

In courier/e-com company’s delivery boy transits by motor cycles generally to deliver multiple packages at different destination in minimal time now the challenges or risks that delivery person faces while delivery are invalid address, in availability, traffic congestion, shipment allocation, return goods or commodity exchange.

Companies are looking forward to come across challenges having breakthrough different strategies after every interval, Strategy implementations should commence at the origin point of transportation and through the entire transhipment process should be considered till delivery to the receiver.

Example: Now if companies hire third party suppliers for regional delivery and to reduce cost where suppliers will procure and load goods in the truck for delivery, here another issue raise that neither sender can co-ordinate to track live movement of the packages, trace about loss or damages of the packages nor receiver can get the status of expected delivery.

Distance to be covered shortly and for express delivery air transportation is requisite and now when co-loaders load goods in the bags or packages they load up as per locations but while doing that there is no trace of individual packages and even they also can’t provide any figurative data about that now if if a manufacturer dispatch multiple packages and receiver claim loss of goods then no body among them would figure out because there are no implications on the performance of co-loaders.

How the strategic implementation would give a fruitful result?

• Efficient packing with IC tag solution through movement of every packages can be monitored.
• Route optimization to alert about traffic congestion, mapping, automatic allocations and navigate an easy reach.
• Infographic demonstration and space estimation using technology and record of current and past inventory.
• Bar code scanning and record information of packages according to individual loaded or to be loaded vehicle.
• Tyre management, fuel rate management, tracking of vehicle and drive tracing for better fleet management.
• Mobility solution for delivery person and other field boys to co-ordinate, execute and update status from anywhere.
• Monitor physical item velocity within a warehouse and suggest optimal pick and put-away locations. ensuring incidents and replenishment are correctly and quickly resolved.

As mentioned earlier, maintaining green logistics can yield lower environmental impacts but it will require a substantial amount of research, planning. There are number of challenges which will appear and can affect service performance and logistics costs while implementing. However, a reduction in environmental impacts is beneficial to all consumers and green logistics should be at the basic level of developing logistics business.

The economy which has be-come more information rigorous, global, techno- logically sensitive is going through remarkable changes. Manufacturing in India is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR of 9.5 percent. But presently, India loses $65 billion every year due to losses incurred by supply chain systems. This is where the need for a reliable and quality logistics solution lies, Headquartered in Gurgaon, Haryana, LogixGRID has been bring-ing in the might of cloud computing and the mobility of mobile platform to the supply chain industry using its innovative solutions. With prime focus in real time results, connectivity and visibility, LogixGRID is setting a bench-mark.

LogixGRID comprises of individuals having exceptional insight into the logistics industry. It includes people who have earned their decade plus experiences from companies like Google, Cisco and Juniper. Putting together the combined experiences in various fields, the company provides cutting-edge ERP and mobility solutions to its clients. LogixERP is India’s first Cloud based logistics ERP which is a turnkey pro-solution designed keeping in mind the logistics requirement of road, rail and air logistics irrespective of the platform. Field employees can easily access the necessary shipment data since LogixERP comes with number of mobile applications. The mobile application runs on Mobile & Rugged hand-held devices.

When it comes to retail sales activities, the product, ClobzSales, provides sales force automation system that enables companies to track their sales representative’s (SR) daily activities. It takes care of complete end-to-end order management and prevents customers from getting into any kind of confusion.

To handle the second big concern of the clients, that is, field activity monitoring, LogixGRID has launched the product Orion. Orion is designed to empower manufacturers and distributors to manage sale and distribution. To be precise, Orion brings Big-Data Analytics to field jobs (Pickup, Delivery, Service, Payment Collection, Invoicing) that allows organizations to optimize field operations in such a way that they can better utilize equipment, manpower, cut costs and eventually improve customer service.

By leveraging their proficiency inlogistics, LogixGRID has acquired Clients amongst India are leading sites- pepperfry.com, amazon in, shopclucs. Corn, koovs.com -including other international clients namely- Acker wines, RaceTrac Petroleum Inc., and Karma Healthcare Ltd. “Our ERP distinguishes itself by being a cloud based SaaS product, Every client is having a separate virtual environment available to him where the reporting will customize as per his requirement. So he has a sort of personal software”, says Gurcharan Singh, Founder, LogixGRID.

LogixGrid has put the pedal-to-the-metal and are headed towards transforming the supply chain into a fully integrated logistics environment by providing top notch end-to-end logistics to the company right from the order collection —through the warehouse management (inventory)—to the final delivery of the product to the customers.

Reference

The logistics industry is being compelled to invest in technology and value added services to cope with customer pressure for better service and lowering the price while competition.

But the result or return of investment has not been found fruitful comparatively so far, the confidence in the entire logistics industry has dropped to a four-year low.

Despite the drop in confidence, companies are using both technology and value added services to retain existing clients and attract new business but question rise again; What drastic change of growth has seen with that investment?

Most of the IT companies offer best of best solutions indubitably, technology leaps double steps overnight but up growing technology should mean much about good results and benefits out of the technology. Every IT companies are preferably going ahead with Hi-tech solutions but despite having less labour and resource costs it puts a hamper on affordability for the customers.

New invention is appreciable but creativity behind any inventions get attained when it is being applied socially. Nowadays an average transport software would cost around 1 lac rupees if it is on single user based under a subscription model, IT companies roll out pay models looking at the structure and business volume of the logistics or transport companies.

A general IT company charge cost for TMS / Logistics software or ERP :

• Server cost
• Software cost
• Deployment cost
• Upgradation cost
• Service cost
• Customization cost
• Integration

Now focusing on small enterprises or start-up companies who look forward to contribute into logistics industry cannot be encouraged in this situation and if they afford also they cannot taste the profit for next decade because of high software maintenance and high market competition.

If a software helped to manage reduce manpower and provide impressive functionality to improve business, then small firm owners would have managed to balance the financial level and satisfied to handle a business with high profit and low labour numbers.

Software companies do business in their leagues but Logistics and transport company owners who purchase this software should be very thrifty while purchasing. A software should be encouraging to be recognized as a route to both control costs and improve service levels and investment in this area is a key trend for the sector.

A transport software has many things to boost an existing business and bring up new opportunities for the companies. A good TMS software would get upper management support to make a clear and extensive list of requirements before looking at the vendors. A cloud based TMS or Logistics software would have been easily integrated along with mobility solutions because convenience is a prime factor for today’s business.

Customization is not only writing and testing the code for initial implementation, but providing long-term support of the custom code and treating any customizations as exceptions every time you upgrade your software.

While investing money on software nobody would think much but it should be knowing that a good TMS software carries modules to provide the entire solution required to run logistics business such as invoicing, pick up, transhipment, fleet, warehousing, delivery, documentation, auditing, sales force, customer service.

One of the most common mistakes made by companies during ERP implementation is spending significant time, energy and money selecting the right software, upon such conditions not only small enterprises but also mediocre companies with existing business will have to break for a while perhaps after certain time of adjustment and endurance they will get good result but system should be implemented for “driving business” not for “a pause and then driving business.”

Logixgrid Technologies Pvt Ltd offers solutions for all type of logistics and transportation service providers with an objective to provide the best solution at the most economical cost which gives opportunities to expand business in future, over many years of observation and experience Logixgrid developed logixERP solution which claims to be the most advanced, wide and effective software for logistics and transportations.

Five KPI for a Logistics company as put-forward in various research papers & market study are :

• On-Time Receiving : LogixERP pickup management module comes with various interfaces using which customer can give pickup requests – Your company website; Call to your customer-care; Your company’s mobile app. All pickup requests received are manage and track from a centralized dashboard. Module, could even auto-assign the pickup to specific pickup boy based on the allocated area. Every pickup request is also auto-pushed to pickup boy mobile phone and pickup boy using his mobile app could confirm the pickup status. During the whole pickup process customer is always kept informed via SMS messages; auto-sends from LogixERP on every key actions.
• On-Time shipping and delivery : On-time shipping require faster and accurate segregation of shipments received. LogixERP, operation module allows faster In-Scan of shipments and further segregation of them based on destination or transportation mode (Air, Railyway, Road). The delivery system, helps you to create faster delivery-run sheet. Using MobiDelivery mobile application delivery boy could use his mobile phone to update delivery from the delivery point. Mobile app also allows to capture receiver signature on delivery.
• Order Accuracy : LogixERP, provides checks and options to increase your order accuracy at every point in operation. Shipment movement (In-Scan, Out-Scan) is integrated with bar-code scanning. Orders are auto-segregated based on their destination, product, customer, etc reducing chances of human error. LogixERP comes with various operation dashboard & reports providing live reporting of inventory.
• Inventory Accuracy : Warehousing module comes integrated with LogixERP, which ensure you always have full control on your inventory. Inventory of various warehouses could easily be monitored from a centralized location and accurate decision could be taken.
• Accurate Invoicing : Accurate invoicing is only possible if the contract or rate master is in-compliance with the customer agreement. LogixERP, rate master provide tools to define rates based on various parameters. The advance in-built rule-engine will ensure that rates are correctly computed based on the configured terms. The invoicing system gives you exact reports on your outstanding payment. LogixERP, provide you option to design invoice formats client-wise – You can give invoices in different design formats to different clients, generated in PDF or Excel.

Achieving high ranking on these 5 KPIs, Logistic company can secure client’s confidence and loyalty. Carefully, analyzing these KPI points you could realize that these KPIs are more related to efficient management of daily processes of a logistic company. Hence, if existing processes are empirically managed and tracked properly till individual activity/action level a logistic company could easily achieve all its key API – Seems to be an easy Task! Though, anyone who is part of logistic business could easily confirm that its not as easy as its looks to be. Majority of these processes are perform manually and are hard to track and their quality is dependent on the individual performing them.

Logistic software had made great advancement in recent years. With the coming of Cloud Computing & Mobile devices various innovative solutions are now available with logistic company to manage its operation using computer/mobile which otherwise would require manual intervention.

LogixERP, is a Cloud ERP designed for logistic companies. The ERP comes with number of mobile application which enable field workforce to be always connected with the system and all their activities are directly update in the system. How LogixERP could support you in achieving your KPIs.