Sellers have always had to have ways to get goods to their buyers, but that need has increased in recent years with the huge rise in e-commerce. More than $420 billion is spent on e-commerce yearly, and that number is steadily rising. That means increased demand for the transportation companies that carry those goods and their more than 12 million vessels. Rather than the traditional model of transporting goods to warehouses that are then sent to stores, the model is evolving to one where those items go straight from the warehouse or distribution center to the customers’ homes. That likely means even more trucks on the road, which requires even more efficient systems to manage the traffic.
Freight management is the process by which companies schedule and manage their freight transportation. This is an important process to help get goods from the manufacturer to a warehouse and then to either stores or customers’ homes. Manufacturers often use a freight broker, which is a middleman who helps ensure transportation for the company’s goods. What a freight broker does is find transportation and schedule in shipments of goods. For example, one company is not going to have enough product to fill up one ship. Instead, that ship will carry goods from multiple companies that all are going to the same country. So the freight broker will work with the shipping company to help fill a ship. The freight brokers also work with the manufacturers to get their goods to multiple different countries.
Once the goods arrive in a country, their journey does not stop. At port, they must be loaded on trains or trucks for the next leg of their journey. Most freight brokers use broker software to do all the scheduling of cargo, and many of these transportation broker software packages offer shipment tracking integration. Shipment tracking integration is a function that allows the broker and the company to track the goods along they way, so they can know where they are, when they got there and when they are scheduled to arrive at their next waypoint. This is a very important function to ensure goods get to their destination.
When people buy things in the store, they often are oblivious to the journey those goods took to get there, but it often is a long and complicated one that wouldn’t be possible without freight brokers.
