Authors: Shasta Duffey & Terese Hunwick
Transportation costs can quietly become one of your biggest and least controlled cost centers. Freight procurement and planning are often reactive, with operations run in silos and data stuck in spreadsheets or on individual hard drives. The result? Missed opportunities, service issues, and clouded visibility into true delivered costs. With day-to-day operations consuming your team’s energy, the challenge of setting up new markets is difficult to overcome and therefore often avoided.
The best performing shippers treat transportation procurement as a continuous improvement process that supports business strategy. After all, what good is it to invest in production capacity if you cannot get required inbound materials to your production facility or finished products out to your customers, while still turning a profit?
Day-to-day execution matters just as much. Aligning procurement, dispatching, and customer service creates a single view of freight activity: enabling smarter shipments, better asset utilization, and fewer costly delays.
The key is organizational maturity. Are you benchmarking your organization on a regular basis? If not, it’s worth asking: Do our people, processes, and tools help us move forward or hold us back? Before you invest in new systems or increased headcount that will “solve all your problems,” a best practices assessment can help you identify where to focus for the biggest return and create a road map for improvement that engages and energizes your team.
At Freshbank Partners, we help companies improve operational efficiencies. If your team is ready to benchmark your current practices to discover where savings may be hiding, let’s connect — we’d love to hear about your challenges.
About the Authors:
Shasta Duffey is an experienced railroader with over 20 years of service to the short line rail industry and its customers.
Terese Hunwick is an expert at developing rail projects from a shipper perspective.
Together they have developed over 100 new rail-served facilities and provide a unique perspective for their clients since they have seen both sides of rail projects. To learn more about Freshbank Partners and our Rail Consulting practice please contact Shasta at shasta@freshbank.us.
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