Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Today, I\u2019ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled \u201cIdentifying Opportunities With Your Inbound Transportation\u201d from C. H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. and Purchasing Magazine.<\/p>\n
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I admit to being attracted to the topic of this whitepaper because assessing cost savings opportunities for inbound freight was a goal when I was first hired by the University of Pittsburgh but quickly was replaced by more aggressive goals. Still, I always wondered what degree of cost savings we would have achieved had this remained on our radar.<\/p>\n
Certainly any organization that allows suppliers to control inbound freight costs is leaving money on the table because, as the whitepaper points out, \u201cwhen you add inbound lanes to outbound, you increase freight volumes, making your business more attractive to carriers at potentially lower rates\u201d and \u201cto hedge for unknown costs, suppliers often factor in a margin of error in your delivered price for inbound product.\u201d Heck, even if your suppliers are simply billing you for what they paid the carrier, there really isn\u2019t an incentive for the suppliers to ensure the cost-effectiveness of the shipping decisions.<\/p>\n
Despite the fact that these types of opportunities are blatantly ignored by many procurement departments, those are basic ideas. But the whitepaper begins to explore more advanced logistics topics such as optimizing shipments. For example, the whitepaper says \u201cIndividual orders can be optimized and grouped together across facilities to create multi-pick, single drop shipments. LTL loads from multiple suppliers can be consolidated into a single truckload to reduce costs and dock congestion.\u201d<\/p>\n
The whitepaper offers some tips for getting started, although they seem to be intentionally too vague in order for you to want to hire the firm that authored this whitepaper. Nonetheless, if you were in the position that I was in (albeit briefly), where you have to begin investigating getting inbound freight costs under control, the whitepaper is at least worth looking at. You can download your own copy for free from Purchasing Magazine\u2019s Web site (registration required).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n