In any large-scale business, it’s important to keep track of the movement of assets, like shipments and production equipment, from place to place. Whether it’s product components being transported to a manufacturer, a completed product going to a warehouse or the delivery of a product to your customer, each leg of the journey is crucial to your success.

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Transportation, distribution and logistics play a key role in business operations. They give businesses a framework to structure and organize every aspect, from order creation to final delivery, as well as monitor company vehicles and personnel. Tools like distribution software can help increase efficiency, making it easier to track the progress of your shipments, but you still need a solid operational framework in place to succeed.

If this sounds like a lot to take in, don’t worry — you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of transportation, distribution and logistics: what they entail, how they work together, why they’re important and how you can manage all these moving parts.

Article Roadmap

• What Is Transportation, Distribution and Logistics?
• What Can Software Do?
• What Benefits Can Software Have?
• Next Steps

What Is Transportation, Distribution and Logistics?

Transportation, distribution and logistics are often listed as three separate elements, but, together, they refer to the continual process of monitoring and planning the movement of your business assets throughout the country, continent and world.

These assets can include personnel, products and their components, and the transport vehicles themselves — all of which require constant attention to ensure there aren’t any slowdowns or bottlenecks in the delivery process.

This process is important for a number of different businesses and industries, as it’s universally used to maintain transparency and accountability in the movement of goods, people and vehicles. It’s internally useful to understand where your assets are located, especially when making decisions about which warehouses and vehicles can make the most cost-effective and efficient deliveries.

Transparency is extremely useful for external stakeholders and customers as well, allowing them to track their shipments in real time from order creation to final delivery. This improves your relationship with your customers, giving them insight into things like shipping delays and allowing them to make plans around when important deliveries will arrive.

Overall, having a solid grasp of transportation, distribution and logistics can help you lower the cost of deliveries, maintain a high standard of product safety and make deliveries more efficient. It’s a rather in-depth process that can require a lot of study, but here, we’ll do our best to break down each of the three elements.

Transportation

Transportation is focused on the vehicles themselves and how they’re performing. You’ll need to coordinate vehicle maintenance and refueling, making sure that the equipment you’re using to transport your assets is up to par. Experts in transportation can facilitate this maintenance and ensure that the vehicles being used are in the best shape possible.

Distribution

Distribution refers to the movement of goods and other assets, tracking the deliveries your company is making and ensuring that materials and orders are reaching their destinations with maximum efficiency. This part of the process is the one that software is most widespread for, helping you and your customers see where shipments are in real time.

Logistics

Logistics intersects with transportation and distribution in several ways, referring to the actual creation and maintenance of plans to keep your goods and vehicles moving as smoothly as possible. Logistics professionals are able to plot out and optimize the flow of assets, from gathering of raw materials to delivery of the final product to customers, something made much easier through the visualization capabilities of distribution software.

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How Can Software Help?

We’ve hinted at how using distribution software can help simplify the complicated processes involved in transportation, distribution and logistics. Every element of this multifaceted process can be improved and optimized with the right software, making the duties of professionals much easier and enabling amateurs to get their feet wet with less potential for failure.

A lot of tedious steps and tasks go into carrying out essential functions of transportation, distribution and logistics that need to be performed as accurately as possible. Software capabilities, like automation and visualization, can not only handle them accurately, but also free up time to work on more complex aspects of your work, such as supply chain sustainability.

Let’s look at some of the pieces of the process that distribution software can help you optimize.

Process Automation

Distribution software can help you smooth out many challenges in the transportation and distribution processes by making some of the most tedious tasks completely automatic. Data entry and warehouse management are two important areas that can be entrusted to software, which helps eliminate errors and speed up the process as a whole.

For example, when your business receives a purchase order and collects payment, distribution software can automatically log the details of the transaction and transfer it to accounting software. It then helps determine which warehouse has the best quality supply and is closest to the delivery location. Human intervention is only required at certain points to approve these suggestions and make occasional changes.

Visualization and Reporting

For transportation and distribution, seeing your deliveries and vehicles in real time is key to identifying slowdowns and bottlenecks, as well as keeping customers informed on the status of their shipments. Distribution software allows you to track the movement of all your important assets and remain informed when anything goes wrong, as well as report deliveries to the proper authorities when crossing borders.

For the logistics side, distribution software allows you to implement your workflow plans and streamline them to ensure that every part of your delivery process is moving in unison, keeping vehicles in good working condition and your deliveries efficient. It also lets you share your plans with other departments to make sure everyone is informed on what needs to be done.

CRM

It’s always important to maintain positive interactions with clients through every step of the ordering process. Distribution software allows you to directly communicate with customers who may have issues, provide detailed reports on the movement of their orders through the distribution pipeline and handle support requests so any ordering mistakes can be quickly rectified.

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What Benefits Can Software Have?

Using software to upgrade your transportation, distribution and logistics process can help your business in efficiency and transparency while reducing errors. Let’s look at each of those in a little more detail.

Efficiency

By automating some of the more time-consuming elements of the transportation, distribution and logistics process, software can save you time and allow you to pay more attention to higher-level tasks. As mentioned earlier, it can also help you figure out where slowdowns may occur and find ways around them through visualization, letting you see where they happen in real time and plan out alternative pipeline paths.

Transparency

Using the aforementioned visualization and reporting features allows businesses to receive and relay regular updates on delivery status and asset location, making sure both customers and internal employees have a detailed understanding of every moving part in the distribution process. This helps business owners and employees pinpoint slowdowns and keeps customers informed on the status and location of orders.

Accuracy

Using automation to take care of data entry tasks and reporting can help eliminate errors and typos that human operators might cause, ensuring that all financial and operational data is as accurate as possible. This has the added benefit of freeing up those human operators to devote their time and attention to more complex tasks, allowing them the space to fulfill those duties accurately and efficiently as well.

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Next Steps

Whether you’re new to the concepts of transportation, distribution and logistics or you’re a seasoned professional, incorporating distribution software into your workflow can help you plan and carry out the movement of your assets throughout the world. If you’re ready to take the next step and start looking into software, we have plenty of distribution software resources to help you shop for options and make your final decision.

How has paying specific attention to transportation, distribution and logistics made a difference for your business’s operating procedures? Is there a specific piece of software that’s helped optimize these processes for you? Let us know in the comments.