Historically, each August through November has become the busiest time to move freight. During peak shipping season, shippers and retailers are rushing to transport goods ahead of the back-to-school and end of year holidays. Along with the rush, they’re facing tighter capacity, higher freight rates, and longer shipment times.
Global disruptions, like the shutdowns of ports due to China’s zero-Covid policy, have swamped ports, positioning this peak shipping season to start even sooner than expected.
It’s crunch time. Your organization must be preparing to ship large volumes of freight as quickly as possible, while also navigating existing global supply chain disruptions and staying ahead of future road-blocks.
Discover How to Stay Ahead of DisruptionsThe good news? It’s not too late to increase your capacity before this peak shipping season. TMS integrations can allow you to free up your internal resources without hiring additional team members or spending months on complex integrations.
Better Connect to Your TMS
Transportation Management System (TMS) integrations give you visibility into your customer’s data, prevent human-error when manually entering shipment details from one screen to another, and enable more efficient operations, giving your team time to focus on other support needs during the busy season.
By integrating your TMS with your agents and carriers before the peak shipping season, you can:
- Eliminate duplicate data entry for your team and increase visibility by automating bookings, milestones, documents, and invoices with overseas agents
- Improve efficiency by automating the shipment lifecycle with ocean carriers
Our standard integrations can quickly connect to many TMS’ including:
Chain.io also supports a variety of connection types, file formats, and business processes.
Having accurate, real-time visibility into the status of a shipment allows you to make business decisions and leads to greater customer satisfaction.
Using our standard Visibility solution to connect to your TMS, you’ll gain real-time visibility to container and vessel location 3rd-party data feeds and receive shipment milestones and AIS data directly to your TMS.
Better Connect to a Web Portal
During peak season, one of the most asked questions from customers is “Where is my stuff?”
Instead of manual tracking and reporting processes for both you and your customer, web portal integrations allow your customers to easily track their shipments, request new quotes or bookings, and generate reports, without additional demand on your team.
Integrating with a web portal like Magaya Digital Freight Portal or LogixBoard gives customers more control and transparency into their shipments, while giving your team time back in their day. These integrations can even lead to opportunities for you to scale and grow business.
Better Connect to Your Customers
Some of the best solutions for creating additional capacity before the rush of peak season are Shipper Standard and Customs Brokerage Automation integrations. These allow data from your Customers to populate in your system without any manual intervention.
Shipper Standard Integrations
With the shipper standard integration, you can easily send and receive bookings, ISF details, attachments, and invoices from shipper customers, saving hours of manual processing time.
Given the uncertainty in today’s shipping market, visibility into what has shipped and where goods are at in real time is an absolute necessity. Chain.io can connect your TMS with a variety of shipper systems to provide proactive status updates throughout the lifecycle of a shipment.
Customs Brokerage Automation
Using the customs brokerage automation integration, you can connect with your importers and leverage electronic data to support faster and more accurate customs declarations, reducing the need for post-summary corrections from your team.
These integrations also allow you to quickly onboard new brokerage staff and reduce reliance on manual data entry, allowing for your brokers to spend more time reviewing customs data and less time keying data between screens.
Establishing Better Connections
Though the peak shipping season is fast approaching, there is still time to implement a standard solution from Chain.io so your team can operate more efficiently.
Supply chain integration offers many benefits, it saves human effort and time and increases your capacity for additional shipment demand from existing and new customers.
Prepare your company for this peak season (and the ones that follow) by connecting with the latest visibility and tracking services, automated agent bookings, and online sales portals.
Our team of logistics service and supply chain experts have the experience to get you up and running quickly. Explore all of our standard integrations with one of our supply chain experts now so you’re ready for the 2022 peak shipping season.
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