Managing freight spend  is critical for food and beverage shippers, who need to hit tight margin targets and can easily lose money on an order that isn’t on time or in full. This makes transportation management operationally intensive, often with irregular constraints, and creates a greater need for having the right processes in place.
While food and beverage companies are prioritizing digital transformation to stay competitive and improve processes, those with less than 200 loads a week have few good options for technology within their transportation department. They either have to rely on a patchwork of internal tools and elbow grease to support the growing needs of their business, or overpay for a slimmed down enterprise solution that is often more effort than its worth.  Until recently, there haven’t been any solutions like Portex, built from day one with the mid-size shipper in mind.
The food and bev shippers who use Portex get the best of both worlds - a modern software platform that is a point of leverage for their team, without the expense and disruption of shoehorning an enterprise technology into their business. As a result, they can maintain tight control over their freight spend, while getting tangible and immediate time savings. Below are 3 ways Portex has helped shippers achieve this (and 3 reasons to love Portex).
For food and beverage shippers, the magic is in managing the balance between cost and reliability.
Its critical to make sure you’re getting fair prices from your freight partners, and that you have a tight handle on the margin impact of freight spend.
At the same time, if your orders don’t arrive on time and in-full at your customers because of poor performance by your freight partners your margin can be impacted by OTIF fees, and you can miss out on future sales due to poor customer service.  Major retailers charge their vendors more than $30bn each year in OTIF fees, and the sales impact of poor OTIF performance is over $60bn a year in the US alone.
Portex gives you the capabilities you need to manage this closely. Portex lets you request and compare rates from your logistics provider network with just a couple clicks, and tracks their performance thru order execution.
This makes it easier to compare prices during the quoting process, and much easier to identify the carriers you can rely on by looking at historical data - without any additional effort from your team to track quotes and responses.
If you’re doing this process with email and excel you could easily be wasting 5+ hours per week.
On the contract side, some of the food and beverage shippers in our network frequently use quarterly, semi-annual, and annual contracts on their recurring lanes.
One shipper planned a special quarter-long-sale with Costco. As the quarter approached, they set up a bid to drive predictability of pricing throughout the duration of the special.
By switching these processes from Excel to Portex, they saved an average of 8 hours per bidding process.
Part of the challenge of managing freight as a food and beverage shipper is the high pressure of each load. Given that inventory cycles can be short and food may be perishable, a delayed shipment can hurt your relationship with your customer or, worse, cause a stockout.
Keeping track of loads can be especially difficult when working with logistics providers who are not proactive with communicating or if someone on your transportation team is out of the office.
Portex solves these challenges by aggregating communication into a centralized channel for both shippers and carriers. This means everyone managing your freight is looking at the same information and can update it at any time, ensuring everyone can easily find the most up-to-date information.
Shippers in our network reported saving hundreds of emails and 15+ hours per week on after hours updates, looping people in, and searching through email to find the latest information.
Food and Beverage shippers know the challenges of adjusting their freight strategy as the market fluctuates, and the difficulty of staying ahead of trends. Portex arms transportation managers with all the data they need to stay on top of the trends at their fingertips. With a couple clicks, operators can get insight into:
Spending Metrics
Carrier Performance metrics
With this data, you’re able to benchmark your performance and share consistent reports with your leadership team, keeping them informed on your progress, without having to scramble to pull reports together and letting it impact day to day execution.
Shippers in our network have been able to consolidate their reporting processes from as much as 2 days to as little as 2 hours.
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Portex offers enterprise functionality at a fraction of the cost and with remarkable simplicity. It takes 15 mins to set up. Check out how Franklin Foods [Reported savings of 4.5 hours per day] and Community Coffee [Reported savings up to 25 hours/week] shippers use us today.
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