The concept of "end-to-end visibility", which we have started to hear frequently in the manufacturing sector, has made the waste generated at every moment of production visible. Dozens of technology companies, established solely to collect data from production lines, have started operating in Turkey.

The visibility of every stage in the manufacturing sector has begun to turn into approaches preferred by bosses as well, due to the costs reduced by waste combating methods (lean production, etc.). In this context, seeing Industry 4.0 evolve from theory to practice in the manufacturing sector is considered promising.

The logistics sector, its biggest supporter, cannot remain indifferent to this revolution in production. In this article, I tried to briefly address the less-than-truckload (LTL) transport method, which will experience one of the most important areas of this change.

Making LTL efficient against complexity

Increasing complexity with the flexibility of the manufacturing sector has forced supply chains to be planned without inventory and in a continuous flow. In order to follow the variable and dynamic structure formed by a supply chain in continuous flow, it has become essential to design different approaches and methods.

Undoubtedly, the first structure affected by this modern SC rule was LTL shipments. Driver bottlenecks, fluctuating demand structures, ELD regulations (Tachograph), transport vehicle optimization problems, and many unlisted external factors have started to make LTL shipments expensive and unsustainable.

With the rise of e-commerce, people have started ordering from toothbrushes to shoes online and expecting the products they order to be in their hands the next day, undamaged and just in time.

To ensure this, being able to load the products of dozens of customers into the same truck, dozens of different invoice addressees, multiple stops and transfer centers, different transport modes, interactions of dangerous goods, and constraints brought by customer-specific demands have made LTL shipments expensive and difficult to manage, yet highly necessary.

In addition, with data sharing (APIs) that makes the costs of many carriers and intermediary firms visible, starting especially with air transport, cargo owners have tended to reduce the aforementioned costs by setting up their own organizations.

Software offering LTL solutions and platforms that digitize this process from end to end have also begun to provide cargo owners with significant knowledge and capability to run their own LTL organizations.

In America and Europe, a cargo owner who sends hundreds of different shipments to multiple addresses every day can gather quotes from these technology platforms and manage their organizations by making quick decisions.

The traditional way to make any cargo shipment is to constantly work with the same companies. Apart from that, the best method is to get bids for every shipment, reach the right carriers, and select the company to give the shipment to by operating decision mechanisms such as the best, fastest, cheapest, and most reliable. This method, however, is quite laborious and costly without using technology.

The Navlungo platform, which we started developing in June 2017, allows you to gather quotes based on the criteria you are looking for to manage your LTL shipments more effectively.

You manage your quotes from a single source, compare companies as you wish, and choose the one that suits you best. After purchasing, you manage the process until the delivery of your cargo through the platform.

Our smart pricing platform, which we continue to develop with our team, will be at your service very soon.