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Optimizing the First Mile With Centrade
What Is the First Mile? Why Is It So Important?
In the global trade and supply chain industry, it’s no secret that every mile matters. Yet, the first mile (also known as the first leg) of a supply chain is one of the most critical. The first mile begins from the moment a Purchase Order (PO) is created and is where importers prepare for goods to be loaded onto a vessel or plane to travel overseas.
Collaboration and communication between partners and vendors is a vital part of the first mile to ensure a seamless journey abroad, far before the goods are even exported. Important decisions and adjustments made during this step can impact the entire course of your supply chain, including production schedules, container optimization, and product specifications like sizing and manufacturing details before a shipper books with a carrier.
Thus, optimizing the first mile is incredibly crucial to your business’s success. Streamlining this first step can ensure issues like delivery delays, inefficiencies, and unnecessary costs don’t occur, which, if they do, could negatively impact the rest of your supply chain process.
Companies can strengthen the possibility of a successful outcome and stay ahead of the competition with Centrade—a cloud-based solution that not only reshapes supply chain operations but streamlines first mile logistics through automation, predictive data analytics, and end-to-end transparency.
Centrade Streamlines the First Mile of Your Supply Chain
How?
We provide shippers and retailers with the first cloud-based, networked platform to transform global trade operations and make managing the first mile easy.
In other words, we take care of the logistics part of your business, so you’re free to focus on what matters most – growing your company and exceeding customers’ expectations.
Centrade empowers you to unlock enhanced tracking and visibility of your supply chain, accompanied by collaborative sharing of all documentation, intuitive internal messaging and notifications, and increased accountability with shipment history records.
With specialized applications ShipLens™ and Orderchain™, Centrade users benefit from enhanced tracking and item-level visibility, allowing you to see exactly what’s shipping before being booked with a carrier or steamship line for a more manageable pre-booking process.
Additionally, Centrade’s integration portal enables enterprises to connect their supply chain network seamlessly, ensuring that everyone has access to the same accurate, up-to-date information. Furthermore, Centrade’s unique carrier agnostic capability simplifies global trade by supporting and tailoring multiple carrier integrations. As a single sign-on solution, our multi-carrier functionality alone can save you time and money by eliminating the need to log in to various carrier sites and search for critical supply chain data.
Centrade’s centralized system manages and integrates purchase orders within our Tradekey™ application portal, allowing vendors to efficiently deny or accept an order, fostering greater collaboration amongst partners. Vendors can indicate the number of each item they are going to ship before a booking is approved and placed on a vessel, all the while keeping your team automatically informed and updated. Scattered communication and coordination between partners have tremendous ramifications for how the rest of the supply chain process will unfold, which is why a unified and collaborative platform like Centrade is critical to ensure seamless planning.
What’s more, supply chain and logistics managers can enter anticipated shipping dates within the system for improved supply chain control and more organized production and shipping schedules. This way, you can plan to mitigate potential delays, unanticipated fees and be better equipped to withstand industry shocks.
Because our Centrade software is a centralized portal, users can immediately communicate quantity changes on bookings or split blanket purchase orders. This capability eliminates the need for back-and-forth emails with vendors and the use of spreadsheets to keep track of large production plans.
With today’s global logistics market, archaic methods and legacy systems not only cause headaches but also waste valuable time and can increase costs for everyone involved.
What can you do instead?
Optimize the First Mile and Take Control of Your Supply Chain With Centrade
As industry disruptions like cyberattacks, weather events, global pandemics, container shortages, and bottlenecks become increasingly common, global supply chains require a proactive strategy that implements digital software to help streamline the very critical first mile and optimize every mile thereafter.
Centrade provides an end-to-end view of your global trade operations by integrating internal and external systems into a single platform, eliminating redundant tasks, digitizing previously manual business processes, and effortlessly bringing all stakeholders together to operate from a single source of truth.
Leverage the power of the Centrade platform for improved proactive global trade management to gain real transparency and complete visibility across an order, communicate changes, and keep track of historical data to deliver more predictability and control.
Don't just manage the complexities of global trade—master them with Centrade.
Ready to take control of your supply chain and improve first-mile efficiency?
Talk with one of our supply chain solutions experts to learn more about how we help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) optimize their global trade network.
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POWER YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN WITH CENTRADE TODAY
Our customers use Centrade to see deeper into their supply chains and improve their logistics management. Join them today and see what powerful supply chain and logistics software can do for you.