Manual processes are slowly killing your business

You’ve done it a thousand times. Walking through operations, you’ve asked yourself, “Why am I paying these smart people to spend half their time doing mindless tasks and data entry? What if I could free up their time to allow them to do what they do best—solve problems. That would give them more purpose, that would give our business more purpose.”

Ok, maybe you didn’t think those words exactly, but I can guarantee that if you’re a high-performing carrier, it was something along those lines. Although detention and dwell times are the items with the largest targets on their backs with respect to operational efficiency, you don’t have to look too far for the next one on the list: manual data monitoring, entry and management.

We generate endless volumes of data each day in our dispatch and accounting systems.  Even more is found in unstructured formats, such as emails, PODs, load tenders and invoices.  Many paid hours are spent taking information from one format and rekeying it into one or more other disparate systems. This duplicated effort is not only expensive, but it opens the (large) possibility of errors through typing mistakes or missed documentation.

The reality is, many of the tasks handled by our operations, accounting and customer service teams are repetitive and prime candidates for automation. In general, any repetitive, rule-based task is a prime candidate for automation. So why haven’t they already been automated? Until recently such automation required a lot of expensive programming that resulted in systems that were not very flexible.  Simple upgrades of your dispatch system could cause the automation to fail simply by having a table renamed. When this happens, your team must revert to the old manual processes until the programmer has the updates in place. The other reason is human nature.