4 Ways to Keep Your Expedited Freight Costs Down

When it comes to running a warehouse or order fulfillment center, sometimes you may need to ship goods a little faster than normal postage will allow for. While this is not uncommon, making sure that you don’t allow your expedited freight costs to spiral out of control is important for maintaining a profitable business.

If you believe you may be struggling with spending too much on expedited freight, try incorporating some of the following into your business:

1. Plan Strategically

One reason for needing to expedite your shipping often comes from poor planning or lack of planning all together. Making sure that you devise and execute an effective order fulfillment and management plan will help make it so that you can drastically cut back on your expedited freight costs.

Having a plan that works for your company is key for keeping everything running smoothly and efficiently. Don’t wait to be bogged down with more orders than you can handle before deciding to set a plan in motion.

2. Hire Experienced Staff

When it all boils down to it, the employees that you staff to run your order fulfillment are the ones that ultimately determine how quickly orders are filled and whether or not the shipment needs to use expedited shipping methods.

By hiring employees that already have knowledge of the industry and can easily adapt to the plan that you have set in motion, you can ensure that the backbone of your operation is strong, efficient, and able to get orders out without the use of expedited shipping services.

3. Anticipate Customer Needs

If your company is one that often deals with repeat customers, one way to cut back on expedited freight costs would be to try predicting their needs beforehand. If their orders are fairly similar and follow a predictable schedule, monitoring and preparing for their needs may make the order fulfillment process much quicker.

Another approach would be to offer some sort of subscription service so that loyal customers can set a schedule for when they will need products and what quantity they will need it in. This will allow you to expect their needs and work them around other orders that you receive.

4. Keep Track of Data

The most important contributing factor to keeping expedited freight costs down would be to keep track of data. More often than not, data will be able to tell you where the bulk of your expenses are coming from and allow you to find ways to remedy them.

Keeping track of data allows you to be able to spot and manage any problems that there are or may occur in the future and find a long term solution for them so that they do not recur in the future, allowing you to keep costs low.
In the end, the best way to combat excessive expedited freight costs is by being more prepared than seemingly necessary at all times. Being over prepared allows you to plan for any unexpected problems or order overflow that could occur. This level of preparedness will equip you with the ability to be able to fill and ship orders in a timely manner, with or without the need of expedited freight.