What is the transportation and logistics industry?
The transportation and logistics industry plays a role in several other industries, like manufacturing, retail, and gastronomy. Any time a company needs products delivered or moved from place to place, they’re engaging a transportation and logistics company.
Running a transportation business means being mindful of the things that can keep you from delivering a smooth experience to clients. Challenges for your organization to work around include:
Supply chain disruptions
As a transportation and logistics company, oftentimes you’re part of someone else’s supply chain, since you’re in charge of moving materials and goods from place to place. Success in this regard means understanding the things your vehicles and process are vulnerable to.
Figuring out how to get around potential supply chain disruptions means considering how your vehicles handle sudden weather events, how well-maintained and equipped for deliveries they are, and which routes are most efficient.
Occasionally, disruptions are out of your control, but the best way to avoid preventable disruptions is to perform regular and thorough vehicle inspections. This way, you can make sure none of the vehicles in your fleet are at risk of breaking down and recall any that are.
Ensuring compliance
Like any industry, transportation and logistics businesses have regulations to abide by. These regulations can vary according to where exactly your business is located, but common include things like vehicle emissions standards, driver safety, and customs requirements.
Failing to meet applicable standards is bad for business, both financially and in terms of reputation. Depending on the severity and frequency of violations, you might even be shut down, so having systems in place that ensure compliance is essential.
Infrastructure limitations
Your ability to provide services on time depends heavily on the infrastructure you have to work with. It’s a fact that poorly paved roads, incomplete waterways, and things of that nature make it harder to complete a route.
Getting around infrastructure shortcomings means taking time to design as unencumbered a route as possible. Look at every option and decide what would be the quickest way to deliver to your clients. Also consider fuel efficiency when you’re designing routes, since fuel costs are a major part of a logistics company’s expenses.
Employee safety
It’s the responsibility of any company manager to make sure employees are safe while doing their jobs. In addition to often being legally required, committing to employee safety is the right thing to do, improves employee retention, and improves productivity by reducing incidents.
Ensure safety by checking that all your vehicles are safe to operate, but make sure to address drivers as well. Properly train workers so that they understand how to do their jobs responsibly.
Running a transportation and logistics business with Lumiform
Many of the issues transportation and logistics companies face are rooted in day-to-day routines. For example, ensuring that your vehicles are safe and compliant is a matter of regularly inspecting them before and after use. That also goes a long way towards preventing supply chain disruptions.
As a comprehensive workflow automation platform, Lumiform is the best tool for streamlining daily operations. The desktop and mobile app allow you to assess and keep an eye on all aspects of your business by assigning your employees tasks and inspections.
Lumiform-based inspections are driven by checklists that clearly lay out every detail which needs examining, ensuring your employees don’t miss anything. That way, you know that everything is safe and functioning as it should. These checklists are also easy to follow, since the mobile app UI guides users through every step of an inspection and enables them to work without oversight.
Keep an eye on all the inspections you assign from the dashboard and receive updates whenever an issue is found. Real-time notifications enable you to get to the root cause of problems that much faster and to implement corrective actions before an issue hurts your business.