Help Control Costs and Increase Customer Satisfaction with These 6 Key Performance Indicators for Logistics
Logistics is a critical area for most businesses. So if you’re not tracking key performance indicators for shipping and logistics, you have a huge blind-spot.
Here are 6 KPIs to help you monitor and mitigate potential problems before they impact your customers’ experience. After all, delivery is a crucial touch-point impacting your brand’s reputation and reliability.
1. Track On-Time Pickup
On-time pickup is a good metric to track before your product leaves your shop floor. Are your shipments typically retrieved late? How often do you have to pay warehouse workers more to wait after-hours for a delayed pickup?
2. Monitor On-Time Delivery
To determine on-time delivery, divide the number of orders delivered on or before the requested date by the total number of orders. To accurately gauge this metric, include every package in the shipment. You should also track how many days it takes each shipment to be delivered.
3. Mitigate Customs Clearance Delays
Once your shipment is on its way, don’t get bogged down with customs delays — including paperwork issues or random inspections. At Zenkraft, we typically find that using electronic paperwork services — like UPS Paperless Invoicing or FedEx Electronic Trade documents — helps expedite customs clearance.
4. Reduce Damages
Reducing the number of shipments that arrive with damages is one of the easiest ways to curtail additional costs and ensure satisfied customers. Keep track of what percentage of shipments are damaged and the cost to replace them. Know in advance if the carrier’s insurance will cover any damages or if you will need to take out an additional policy. If you’re using a third-party logistics service, order accuracy is just as important; does the shipment contain what was ordered? Additionally, shippers can reduce damages by analyzing data on which routes damages occur the most.
5. Reduce Theft/Shrinkage
Within the European fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, costs from theft and/or shrinkage was valued at 24 billion Euros in 2003 alone. Imagine what those costs might be today. This is a crucial KPI that should be managed — and reduced — over time. In order to best reduce these additional costs, track KPIs to include process failure, internal theft, external theft, and intra-company fraud.
6. Protect Life Sciences Shipments
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that up to 40% of vaccines shipped worldwide degraded due to temperature variations during transport in 2017. If a shipment falls outside of a safe range for a certain timeframe, it’s referred to as an excursion and the product can no longer be used. Measuring temperature excursions and analyzing the data to identify where they are occurring is critical and can lead to improvements during the most vulnerable parts of travel.
Interested in implementing Zenkraft to manage all your shipping, tracking, and returns in Salesforce? We can help!