SmartFreight

Ken Aitken, Global Managing Director, SmartFreight

We are highly dependent on the quick and efficient supply of commodities like food, water, beverages, clothes, books, gadgets, medicine, furniture, and more as commercially available products. But we must realize that these products reach us through extraordinarily demanding business processes. As a brand develops a product, manufacturers start making large quantities of these products and they are distributed to stores or to markets from where we can purchase them. This journey of the product from its origin to the consumer is called supply chain management—the lifeline of the retail and eCommerce business.

Within modern supply chain management, the biggest challenge today is to achieve efficient transportation or shipping of goods from origin to destination. Because there are millions of consumers today, businesses face incredibly high demands to develop, manufacture, and deliver our favourite products quickly, responsibly, and cost-efficiently. So, businesses need help to manage large quantities of products over large geographical distances.  

So, how do retail businesses overcome this challenge? One of the best practical answers is presented by ‘SmartFreight’, an award-winning transportation management service headquartered in New South Wales, Australia. It’s a globally renowned service today, trusted by several national and international brands around the world, because it gives businesses complete control over their transportation activities. Since its inception in 1997, it has been fully invested in the immense potential of technology to improve supply chain management. Through consistent service excellence for more than two decades, it has become one of Australia’s most reliable and innovative shipping solutions providers today.

Supporting All Transportation and Logistics Needs within Retail

Being an early believer and investor in technology’s potential, SmartFreight has anticipated the exponential growth of the retail and eCommerce industries that we see today. It has thus developed extremely helpful software focussing on the shipping needs of the retail business. It’s a comprehensive suite of web-based solutions that helps businesses within all industries, including brick-and-mortar stores and online retailers to manage product shipments with ease.

SmartFreight succeeds today thanks to six key strengths:

1. An Exceptional Control Mechanism: The delivery of products is critical in the retail business. As businesses distribute products, goods or raw materials through road vehicles, ships, or flights, it’s difficult to overlook delivery. But SmartFreight’s software gives customers centralized control to expertly manage the shipping delivery experience. It thus gives users complete control and visibility, to ensure a safe, risk-free journey from start to finish.
2. Powerful Software: SmartFreight offers powerful software to manage products shipments, in a simple way. To facilitate smoother management, it connects users with hundreds of possible transport service providers and travel routes. To optimize the entire experience, it empowers users to make key decisions concerning total costs, delivery speeds, and environmental impact.
3. Easy-to-Scale: “SmartFreight is web-based and can be hosted on-site on servers or in a public or private cloud. It’s modular, so, as your business grows, you can align new features to support the most complex supply chain processes,” Mr. Nav Goundar, the company’s General Manager, says. Realizing that each business’s needs are unique, its software has been cleverly designed to serve small start-up’s as well as complex global multi-site businesses. For minimal needs like moving just a few items a day and for large distribution centres processing thousands of items an hour, SmartFreight proves effective each time.
4. A Powerful Reporting Service: “Our reporting capability enables our users to measure a transport service provider’s performance immediately, rather than relying on their reports. Actual shipment costs and details are extracted from SmartFreight, helping users to manage transport providers and even look for better alternatives,” Mr. Goundar explains.
5. A Unifying Branding Service: Users receive an email once goods are dispatched, with their unique brand logo, colours and images attached. Through a SmartFreight portal, they can track goods seamlessly along the journey. This is consistent regardless of transport providers, removing the need to search from third-party websites.
6. Seamless Integration: SmartFreight software can be seamlessly integrated with over 180 warehouse management software (WMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, eCommerce or accounting platforms and dozens of leading online marketplaces, to facilitate smooth order tracking and fulfilment.

Expertise Trusted by Global Brands within the Retail Space

Recently in 2018, SmartFreight became a part of the WiseTech Global group, a leading developer and provider of software solutions to the global logistics industry. By combining SmartFreight’s two decades of experience with WiseTech’s software expertise with global standards, the managerial team aims to improve the quality of its services and grow, even further.

SmartFreight has become a market leader today because it supports retail businesses to take on transportation with confidence. Its ability to streamline, simplify and centralize transportation management for the retail business has attracted worldwide recognitions. It gifts businesses a precious chance to manage transportation, save costs, reduce carbon footprint, and continually improve logistics over time. Its clients include premier brands such as Mazda, Hyundai, Seiko, Epson, Yamaha Motor, Pandora Jewellery, DHL, Australian Fine China, and Parcelforce, to mention just a few.

“Every two seconds of every minute of every hour, somewhere on the planet, a SmartFreight label is produced to move shipments. We have well over 3,000 customers and some 16,000 users. We move freight value in excess of $ 600 million AUD, shipping to and from 195 countries, each year,” Mr. Ken Aitken, the company’s Global Managing Director, updates.

Growing the Business through eCommerce and Service Improvement

Regarding the future, SmartFreight wants to expand its footprint in the eCommerce space by adding more shipping integrations to its online marketplaces. It’s also enhancing its offerings in reverse logistics, a crucial and complex part of supply chain management. “Our parent company continues to build seamless integrations into their CargoWise platform of which we are a part of. This will allow us to engage with more global freight forwarders to continually assist with their last mile delivery requirements,” Mr. Aitken sums it up.