Route, Rate, and Rank Final Mile Carrier Services at the Speed of eCommerce

ECommerce moves fast. When it comes to meeting the evolving challenges of today’s online shoppers, speed and flexibility are everything. With demanding Gen-Z consumers now accounting for 40% of all online purchases, the pressure is on for businesses to deliver more, faster, and better. But rising shipping costs and diverse carrier networks are making it harder than ever to quickly calculate and compare service costs and delivery times. Having the ability to rate and rank a wider range of carrier services at high speeds is crucial to protecting precious margins and improving the customer experience in digital storefronts, but also during order allocation, fulfillment, shipping, and returns.

Unfortunately, legacy parcel shipping systems are failing to keep up. They rely on sluggish carrier rating APIs, which are only as fast as the slowest carrier response time. Some of them during peak season when they are needed most. It’s no surprise—carriers aren’t exactly eager to make it easy for businesses to compare their services against the competition. This leaves eCommerce platforms, ERP, OMS, and WMS systems struggling with outdated, unreliable methods for calculating rates and selecting services. Inaccurate “rules of thumb” prevail.

Sendflex’s next-generation parcel TMS picks up where legacy systems leave off, delivering an in-platform optimization engine that processes thousands of carrier contract rates, transit times, and business rules per second. Say goodbye to the slow, unreliable carrier APIs and hello to a faster, smarter way to route, rate, and rank your shipments. Sendflex ensures you can meet the demands of today’s eCommerce environment with precision and speed.

Dynamic Routing

The first step in effective carrier optimization is qualifying the right carrier services. While “rate shopping” might sound straightforward, the reality is far more complex due to the dynamic nature of eCommerce. Prior to making rate calculations, Sendflex provides no-code, configurable business rules that can be applied during optimization processes to qualify (or disqualify) the carrier services that should be considered based on multiple critical factors.

• Customer preferences: Tailor deliveries to meet customer needs to maintain customer-focused initiatives and cultures. This includes considering preferred delivery days and times, sustainable delivery options, local pickup points for urban consumers to avoid porch piracy, and other service offerings that optimize the delivery experience. Additionally, they work to accommodate third-party accounts and customized labels and forms for B2B customers. This customer-centric approach helps build brand loyalty and enhances the overall customer experience.
• Carrier incentive tiers: Monitor and maintain primary carrier incentives while diversifying carrier networks by tracking tier totals and disqualifying alternative services that risk losing discounts. Resume routing to alternate carriers once primary carrier tier levels are met. This ensures you don't lose valuable volume discounts while exploring and taking advantage of other cost-effective options.
• Carrier pickup limits and cutoff times: Keep track of pickup limits and cutoff times, selecting alternative services as needed to meet promised delivery schedules to ensure shipments go out on time, even when primary carriers have reached their limits.
• Surcharge avoidance: Avoid unexpected parcel surcharges and fees with accurate cartonization calculations to steer clear of dimensional weight adjustments. Automatically check for conditions that will result in address corrections, oversized fees, extended delivery areas, and residential surcharges. This minimizes the gap between expected and actual costs, preventing spend leakage and margin erosion.
• Delivery area optimization: Choose carriers based on their strengths in specific lanes, regions, and delivery point characteristics whether it’s USPS for PO Boxes, regional carriers for rural areas, liftgates, or DHL for certain international destinations to take advantage of the most efficient and reliable delivery service for each area.
• Shipment and SKU attributes: Match shipments with the right carriers based on specific needs such as handling fragile goods, cold chain logistics, or valuable items. For instance, avoid sending dangerous goods by air and select an LTL carrier for heavier items to take advantage of lower costs per pound than aggregate parcel costs.

With these comprehensive routing capabilities, Sendflex helps you put every shipment in the most qualified hands, optimizing every delivery from start to finish.

Precision Rating

Once the routing optimization process filters out disqualified carrier services, the Sendflex high-speed rating engine steps in to calculate the best rates for remaining carrier options. This includes qualified carrier contract service rates, surcharges, accessorials, special service fees, and time in transit.

Sendflex’s configurable instructions allow for flexible billing adjustments based on customer type, delivery area, SKU type, ship-from location, and other factors. This means you can offer express shipping but charge for ground rates or provide free shipping for premium-tier customers. Customer-centric pricing should never be one-size-fits-all, and Sendflex ensures it isn’t. With Sendflex’s in-platform rating and time-in-transit calculations, you get near-instantaneous results–30 rates in 17 milliseconds in a recent bench test–allowing you to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.

Intelligent Ranking

After routing and rating carrier services based on qualifications and transit times, Sendflex ranks them according to their ability to meet delivery promise criteria and cost-effectiveness. But it doesn’t stop there. Sendflex empowers shippers to adjust these rankings, promoting or demoting services based on carrier performance metrics, ensuring that total “landed cost” is considered.

• On-time delivery performance: Some carriers might offer lower rates but fail to deliver consistently on time. Sendflex allows shippers to promote or demote carriers based on their punctuality for different types of shipments, days, or destinations, ensuring reliable delivery.
• Damage rates: Even if a carrier is cheaper, frequent damage to goods can increase the real cost of using their service. Sendflex enables shippers to use value coefficients to adjust rankings for carriers based on their performance with fragile or high-risk items, ensuring that quality is not compromised and returns are avoided.
• Billing accuracy: Carriers that frequently require audits and claims for billing inaccuracies add hidden costs. Sendflex factors in the administrative burden of dealing with these issues, adjusting rankings to reflect the true cost of using each carrier.

By applying these performance criteria, Sendflex ensures that your carrier rankings are not only based on total landed cost but also on the quality and reliability of service, leading to better decision-making and improved overall shipping performance.

Complexity Conquered, Enterprise-wide

Using Sendflex's in-platform parcel optimization engine, organizations can now control costs and enhance customer delivery experiences at every stage of the order-to-delivery process:

• Order creation: When it comes to estimating carrier rates, stop guessing. If you guess too high, you could lose a customer. Guess too low and you erode margin. Accurately quote rates and delivery times in digital storefronts, ERP systems, and marketplaces. Utilize cartonization algorithms to determine carton sizes and weight, and reward valuable customers with more precise delivery commitments.
• Order allocation: Continue to determine the best shipping location during order allocation based on inventory availability, shipping costs, transit times, and optimization instructions. Adjust order optimization plans as necessary.
• Fulfillment: Optimize cost-effective packing processes by looking for opportunities for cartonization and drop shipping using Sendflex's planning optimization processes.
• Shipping: Automate weighing, enforce routing and rating, create customized labels and documents, and send shipment notifications. Continue to enforce shipping policies.
• Tracking: Provide customers with visibility to tracking and alert them with exception notifications when delivery promises are at risk.
• Returns: Apply returns disposition instructions to reduce costs based on SKU, customer type, and product conditions. Consolidate returns whenever possible.
• Analytics: Run high-speed optimization to conduct iterative “what if” simulations based on historical shipping data. Use insights to fine-tune and operationalize continuous improvements.

For more information on Sendflex parcel TMS optimization capabilities, contact our experts for a consultation and demo.

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The Five Parcel TMS
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