Alpega’s tooll was rebuilt following years of data gathering and discussions with different stakeholders on the challenges of carrier allocation, with the primary end goal of helping shippers become more compliant with carriers’ contracts while reducing stress and manual errors.
If you are a planner, surely you have found yourself juggling:
- Shifts in demands and urgency of the loads
- Refused orders by established partners and spot bidding as a second option to ensure delivery of your goods
- Blind spots and lessons learned to be taken into account for future planning
With the Carrier Allocation Engine, you can forget about them! Shippers can easily add information on their existing carriers, closed tender outcomes as well as business rules to be taken into account for the planning.
The engine has currently four main capabilities that can be applied for your carrier allocation:
• Carrier ranking: preferred carriers based on order rejection or expiration (as indicated by the shipper) are selected.
• Multiple requests: orders are sent to a group of carriers, and the first one accepting gets the offer. This option is particularly useful for specific goods or urgent deliveries.
• Capacity: order allocation is based on predefined commitments and volumes agreed upon with each of the partners.
• Spot bidding: a bid request is launched to your carrier network and the system automatically awards the bid based on predefined business rules.
Supply chain managers with various preferred logistics providers can find it challenging to keep track of all their requirements, especially when there are multiple lanes involved. The current market conditions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted that there is a need for shippers to better comply with their contractual commitments to carriers, but also a need to find alternatives when load volumes skyrocket.
A tool like Alpega’s Carrier Allocation Engine is the perfect solution to manage your planning in an easy and error-free way. By allocating the right proportion of your business to your contracted partners, you ensure better rates when it comes time to launch your tenders. And by automating the process you can save significant time in the process.
All the bundles within the Alpega TMS suite have carrier allocation capabilities, but there is a new Carrier Allocation Engine within the Connected bundle of Alpega TMS, which is the bundle particularly useful for businesses transporting primarily on road.
At the end of April, we hosted a webinar on Carrier Allocation and Dynamic Planning with three of our in-house experts at Alpega Group, introducing this tool. If you missed the session, but want to learn more about it, you can tune in here.
If you want more detail from one of our team members, schedule a chat with one of them here.
