Intelligence: The Magic that Makes Your Sleigh Fly

“Twas the night before Christmas and all through the dock — were parcels that weren’t picked up by five o’clock!”  

The holidays should be a joyful season for both you and your customers. But let’s face it, things are bound to go wrong when you’re making thousands of deliveries to thousands of locations. Missing an important delivery promise is like finding coal in your stocking on Christmas morning. It’s a lose-lose for both the shipper and the consumer. 

How can you minimize your risk of ending up with a loading dock full of misfit, unwanted packages on December 24 — along with angry or disappointed consumers? The answer is simple. You need to increase your level of business intelligence to avoid this situation. Gathering insights and maximizing your real-time awareness increases the probability that your brown paper packages, tied up with string, will arrive on time. 

First, you need to choose your carriers carefully, based on their documented performance. While everyone makes mistakes, don’t work with a partner that makes a lot of mistakes. Second, you need to accelerate and optimize every step along the delivery journey — from your facility to the store, home, office, or other destination. And finally, you need to have real-time visibility into the status of your orders at every moment. When something goes wrong, you need to find out at the earliest possible opportunity — then pivot quickly to resolve the issue before it impacts the customer’s holiday joy. 

Advanced Technology Fuels a More Successful Journey  

If achieving this level of business intelligence sounds impossible, then you haven’t been paying attention to the exciting advancements in parcel shipping technology in recent years. Predictive analytics, software algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) may sound intimidating, but advanced technology is increasingly easy to access and use — and it delivers the real-time intelligence you need.  

Transportation management systems (TMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), parcel execution solutions, and other digital logistics tools are purpose-built to increase intelligence, insights, and awareness for the modern shipper. They automate processes, as well as support your most important decisions, like the ones made during the peak holiday shipping season. Here are three ways advanced technology can help you avoid missed deliveries, lost and damaged orders, misfit packages on the loading dock, and other holiday mishaps: 

• Build a better sleigh. From the North Pole to your warehouse, the right pre-season preparation is essential. Use data and analytics to take a close look at your 2023 holiday carriers and how well they performed. It’s common to look at historic carrier costs, but equally important are historic service levels. Since Thanksgiving occurs on November 28 this year, we’re facing the most condensed holiday shipping season since 2019. If your carriers didn’t perform well under the more relaxed schedule of 2023, then it might be time to re-assess your mix. As you consider new shipping partners, ask to see their historic performance data and on-time metrics. They should be able to provide these kinds of insights easily and immediately in today’s age of digitalization. 

• Map an optimized route. Advanced solutions like a TMS are invaluable for getting products from Point A to thousands or millions of Point Bs in the fastest, most efficient, and most profitable manner. Digital WMS solutions can automate and accelerate the processes of picking orders, preparing shipments, optimizing loads and routes, and managing handoffs. If you’re not using these systems in-house to optimize your parcel shipments from the first mile, then consider installing them — or outsourcing planning and execution to a partner who leverages the newest technology. Your time and cost savings will justify the investment. 

• Course-correct during the journey. It’s time to take off — and during the journey, technology continues to contribute an enormous amount of value. Digital solutions track shipments in real time, recognize potential disruptions, and keep the plan on track. You can achieve real-time visibility, awareness, and insights by linking your TMS and other solutions directly to carrier systems. That real-time awareness can be shared with the customer to increase confidence and satisfaction. Whatever happens along the way — from extreme weather to route closures — advanced technology increases the probability that you’ll deliver on time, in full. 

Why Fly Blind? Let Redwood Guide Your Sleigh 

At Redwood, we understand the challenges you’re facing. You have a lot going on in your core business. And all this holiday preparation requires a lot more than 12 days. That’s why hundreds of parcel shippers rely on Redwood to help them get through not just peak season, but every season. Like a certain red-nosed reindeer, Redwood can illuminate new opportunities — and guide your holiday shipping plan to success, through every kind of weather. 

Our Parcel Advisory experts can help you get the carrier mix right, define and implement a new network model, negotiate better rates, and take other strategic actions. For hands-on help, Redwood’s proprietary Parcel Execution solution is unmatched in its ability to manage the day-to-day work of dispatching shipments, saving time and costs via intelligent automation.    

Redwood also offers the advanced technology expertise you need to implement a WMS or TMS, connect your internal systems, or integrate with carriers and other trading partners. All these digital improvements will not only fuel greater parcel shipping success via increased business intelligence — but also drive cost and service improvements across the end-to-end supply chain.  

You can start ensuring a clear loading dock, healthy profit margins, a million satisfied consumers, and maybe even a partridge in a pear tree by reaching out to Redwood today. Backed by a unique combination of parcel expertise and technology know-how, we’re the perfect companion for your holiday travels. 

Check out our Redwood Parcel Holiday Shipping Guide page for all the latest insights.