The digital landscape in the logistics industry is changing fast. Increasing demand from shippers for digital experiences is driving huge investments into digital freight forwarders and technology providers. As forwarders and customs brokers jump into the new waters of digital technology, it’s important to understand how this investment will impact the top and bottom line.
To help with this, the NCBFAA and Logixboard Organized a webinar on “Digital ROI: How To Integrate Digital Technology And Leverage It As A Key Revenue Driver.”
In this webinar, an expert panel unpacks the true ROI of digital technology, and how to optimize it. The speakers dove into conversation themes around the topic of digital ROI, including:
- What tech should be implemented/prioritized first by forwarders?
- How do you measure the ROI of digital tools used?
- The Importance of Change Management
- Technology’s Impact on Employee Recruitment & Retention
- Digital Forwarders vs. Traditional Forwarders
- Buy vs. Build?
What tech should be implemented/prioritized first by forwarders?
All speakers agreed that Customer Experience technology and internal technology (to better streamline operations) should be a high priority for forwarders trying to stay competitive in the changing industry.
When we talk about digital transformation, I think we’re all caught up in this tide in our environment, in our workplace, of where’s the best place to put it? What do we need to do? I think I agree, that other than backing the customer, it’s streamlining operations.
Automation, visibility, and payment processing were some of the other technology solutions encouraged by our speakers. These solutions need to be considered while evaluating your own company’s operations, your customer’s needs, and what takes the highest priority to best elevate your business.
The expectation to use those digital technologies is a pressurizing situation. So they’re actually reaching out to us now. That’s just to come in and assess their entire operation, their processes, and find out where we can interject solutions either through CargoWise, but more often than not through complementary technologies.
Join the conversation by hearing more about our speaker’s top suggestions for what technology solutions should be prioritized first in the full webinar.
How do you measure the ROI of digital tools used?
From improved operational efficiency, to increased sales, measuring the return from investments in implemented technology can be done in countless ways.
For us, if you have followed our growth, we’ve gone from five offices to now 12. We continue to grow every day.
Greg discusses Green Worldwide Shipping’s return of their own investments in technology as not only measured in operational growth, but advancements in the actual product available to their customers now. A happy customer equates to a healthy increase in sales.
It’s been about business development, how do we compete and create a complete solution that we can sell to your client base that also is customizable to what they need? We’ve been able to do that, we completed that for us over the last year and a half and it’s been very successful.
Being able to pair a competitive digital solution for customers with the advanced industry knowledge of traditional forwarding companies, is a match made in heaven for winning and retaining shipper business. Julian, CEO of Logixboard, can attest to this with the success of customers who implemented and released Logixboard to their shippers.
We took a look at our customer base, and I’ll talk a little bit of numbers. On average, we saw $9.4 million increase last year in revenue across our customer base, which was across SMB and mid-market freight forwarding companies.
Even more ways to measure the benefits of integrating digital tools into your forwarding company were discussed, but it was also made very clear that putting in place a team to tackle this change management was also important.
The Importance of Change Management
With talks of integrating new technology into current systems and protocols of logistics companies, the importance of having change management strategies in place was highlighted in the webinar.
Having a team, even if a singular person, in charge of change management is the key to staying on top of innovations in the industry, evaluating tools in the market efficiently, and having a smoother transition of those tools into your current systems.
If you start to look at digitizing, make sure that you have these pieces out there. Make sure you have the team that can handle the conversations when you get there, it makes it faster and a lot easier.
When looking at these external technology solutions, another valuable point to consider is if that external team is supplying support in your integration of their product.
I’m seeing that in companies like Logixboard, that the vendors anticipate this and are very sensitive to this. Build in that sort of onboarding piece to the delivery of their product, have those conversations early on, provide that guidance and that sense of hand-holding early on to get those prospective forwarders across the bridge to using these technologies.
Instilling the importance of change management within your company’s decision-makers will help ensure your team is prepared to take on the changes within the logistics industry.
Technology’s Impact on Employee Recruitment & Retention
Technology not only has an impact on winning customers but on winning and securing your own staff of talented employees.
Put tools into the hands of the staff that they will enjoy and have a better work experience. And then their retention rate goes up as well and they don’t lose that money on that employee churn, new hires, losing people, starting over. I think that’s probably a really important aspect.
When thinking of ROI, one cannot forget to take into account the effect of useful, innovative technology on securing your team and ensuring that you are able to keep them. This is not only protecting the strong asset that is your team, but also from the additional cost of vetting, training, and onboarding new people.
Digital Forwarders vs. Traditional Forwarders
What separates a digital forwarder and a traditional forwarder? Asked by an event attendee, this question was deeply analyzed by the speakers.
Technology is not new in the industry of freight forwarding, but there has been a surge in innovations that have enabled some forwarding companies to stand out in the pack. Holly states that the difference between these two categories of companies comes from who is utilizing technology to better improve operations.
When we remove some of that very tedious effort from the operations and replace it with digital technologies that utilize artificial intelligence, utilize machine learning, OCR, and decision-making capabilities, we streamline that operation
All the speakers were also aligned in the sentiment that freight forwarding is, and will continue to be, an industry very defined by good communication and customer service by it’s people but with improved overall experience and operations enabled by technology.
We are still a people business. It’s just how can we make that the delivery of our clients assets and the things that they need information wise, much easier for both our people, and obviously, the customer base
Julian also brought up that this divide is not solved by one solution. You do not have to have millions to spend, time to build, and hire the people needed to build an internal solution. Companies like Logixboard have provided answers for forwarders that are missing that technology piece to compete and win in the new forwarding marketplace.
Different providers, are also raising a lot of venture to go at it from a very different approach. Instead of trying to build a freight forwarding company with great tech, how do you build a great technology to empower the existing ecosystem?
To ensure your forwarding company is shifting to the necessary category of “digital forwarder,” the next question is whether to buy or build your solution.
Buy vs. Build?
Introducing new technology solutions always brings up the “Buy vs. Build” debate on whether to build internally or buy pre-made solutions that integrate into your existing systems. This panel of speakers overwhelmingly agreed though that for this industry, in these changing times, the benefits of deciding to “Buy” outweighs building.
They have to get out of that mindset that says, ‘Well we’ll spin something up in-house and we’ll spend the next five years investing internally,’ only to deliver something that’s outdated. You’ve just got to get on the bandwagon.
The struggle to take time to build internally while also staying updated with the current technology in the industry is a strong point of contention for building your own solution argument. Not only does this take time to implement to customers and lead to possible loss of potential customers, but it can lead to an outdated solution that doesn’t result in a return on investment.
The continued innovation needs to be something that’s there, which is incredibly expensive as well. So to me, it’s like time to value but technology becomes really stale, really quickly and partnering with companies that are really well financially backed, that are going to continue to innovate to build solutions for you and for your customer base as well.
Cargowise and Descartes are both used commonly by logistics providers for their transportation management systems. Logixboard is a white-labeled platform that empowers these companies to increase their sales, retain their best customers, and demonstrate the success that buying your digital solution can lead to.
You can integrate with just about any software that’s out there. I mean, obviously, we have Cargowise. Logixboard for us was a very, very succinct product that marries itself to Cargowise very well.
The digital transformation of the industry is here and evaluating whether you will be buying or building your tools is a question that needs to be examined.
Watch the full webinar!
We invite you all to watch the complete webinar and reach out with any questions on Digital ROI.
