Continuous improvement programs are important for reducing waste within your transportation processes – and overall business environment. With rising freight rates, lack of capacity, and the driver shortage, transportation operations must create strategies to eliminate waste, while lowering costs and boosting efficiencies.

Continuous improvement is defined as “a method for identifying opportunities for streamlining work and reducing waste.” Often businesses and manufacturing companies create continuous improvement initiatives to eliminate waste throughout their organization, including too much inventory, movement, time, and more. Establishing a formalized continuous improvement program helps companies identify cost-saving opportunities and work better and smarter.

What constitutes waste within a transportation operation?

One of the biggest wastes in transportation is empty trucks. This could refer to empty backhauls, insufficiently cubed out trucks, and trailers that lay empty in yards because a process to track them isn’t easily available. In a world where there is a capacity crisis and roughly 10 loads for every available truck, it’s unthinkable that there should be empty capacity. Supply chain professionals can work on continuously improving their trailers with the help of technology.

There are many ways technology can aid in continuously improving the efficiency of trucks. Technology like Kuebix’s FleetMAX program helps pair available backhaul capacity with matching freight to fill empty miles. Rating and booking with a TMS allows shippers to compare different modes side-by-side to optimize their shipments and optimization technology can be used to build the best load and route for every order.

Another common waste in the supply chain is the underperformance of carriers. When a carrier shows up late, doesn’t have the right size truck, doesn’t have the right number of people to help load and unload, or, even worse, doesn’t even show up, your transportation operations suffer, along with customer satisfaction. Establishing and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) and sharing these results with your carriers can help to improve their performance and keep your operations running smoothly. Predictive analytics can be used to generate scorecards on carrier performance to show savings to upper management. Leveraging analytics to continuously improve your supply chain can reduce freight spend by 10-20%.

Many TMS systems include business intelligence and reporting capabilities, which can be used to help management make better decisions. These decisions can lead to continuous improvement of transportation operations. By continually improving these operations, your business can lower costs, better meet customer expectations and sustain profitability.

If you are doing business the same old way you have been doing for years, then you are not continually improving. With a continuous improvement program, your business will strive for excellence – and will deliver significant value to customers and shareholders.