Given the constant challenges and upheaval in the global logistics sector, enhancing operational efficiencies through process automation should be at the top of the agenda for every freight forwarder. 

While optimization can still be seen as an annual exercise or a luxury nice-to-have, more companies are coming around to the idea of integrated process automation as a key driver to enhance staff productivity, by removing the headache from traditional admin processes.

Significant cost savings can be generated through reducing manual processes, particularly around invoice reconciliation. But in an increasingly competitive global market, small efficiency gains can have profound results across the whole business, creating new workforce benefits where changing roles to be less repetitive can have a host of benefits.

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How does process automation enhance productivity?

So, what staff productivity problems can be solved through automation? Freight forwarding is a business that involves a great deal of admin and simultaneous operation. Automation can help streamline those daily processes, remove errors and allow more time to target the core challenges within the business. It can even generate new higher skilled job roles that can deliver more value for the customer relationship and business development. These can most effectively lie within new lead development and sales roles, forward planning for peaks of demand, planning and execution, demand modelling, dispute resolution and more.

Automating specific processes has already enabled many companies to achieve significant cost savings in labor. Expedock delivers savings of between 30% - 80%, compared to around 10%-20% delivered by AI/OCR Software. However, the benefits of enhancing staff productivity go beyond just saving money to free-up resources to focus on higher value work. It can unlock existing resources to target new product and service development, which is crucial to growth and momentum. It also allows for: better financial management; strategic growth and disruption planning; sales and marketing; HR and team building.

In a recent webinar with Expedock, Royal Robinson of Gebrüder Weiss shared his feelings on sharing a like-minded strategy with his sales team. While focused on business development, he makes some interesting remarks about how to get the most out of employees and enhance productivity.

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Process automation is changing productivity

The truly game-changing businesses succeed because they spend their time wisely, innovating, and creating, rather than administrating. Automation already answers many of the problems freight forwarders experience in their day-to-day operations from invoice reconciliation to sending purchase receipts to suppliers. Streamlining these routine administrative tasks recoups hours of working time and is rapidly becoming a necessity in our modern competitive environment. 

To get the most out of intelligent automation (IA), processes and data need to work together. Automated processes enable greater efficiency, while data enables better decision-making. By coordinating these attributes, and having a clear outcome in mind, businesses can add intelligence to how and where they automate processes in a way that accelerates business outcomes while ensuring the quality of service is continually enhanced to meet changing customer needs.

With business process automation tools, companies increase staff productivity, reducing task completion times from hours to minutes. Expedock AI software is especially applicable for streamlining tasks such as manual data entry, information search and invoicing. By employing digital business automation tools, companies can avoid mistakes, resulting in time and cost savings.

To learn more about how Expedock helps its customers streamline their operations, please join us for a live demo.