How to Reduce Supply Chain Costs During Times of Inflation

Now, more than ever, it is critical to examine and reduce your supply chain costs. While reducing costs in your supply chain is a continuous improvement effort that companies have worked on for years, the need to reduce costs is even more pressing now.

There are many factors that impact these expenses. Minitab has the tools to help you investigate and reduce costs while keeping your customers happy.

Minitab's Supply Chain Module provides guided data analysis in commonly used and understood terms. Shift your focus to improving key performance indicators (KPIs) like cycle time, inventory, delivery, quality, profitability and costs without worrying about which analysis to use.

Freight Cost Per Unit

Many companies track the freight cost per unit, which is simply the total freight costs divided by the number of units shipped. There are many factors that can reduce this cost. Some companies have worked with shipping companies and customers to achieve win-win-win situations. Consider:

• Can you consolidate small shipments? Or at least keep the volume steady by finding a partner and group your shipments?
• Can you reduce your dunnage even more? Your carriers may have some valuable ideas.
• Are your pallets packed efficiently? Is there room for improvement?
• Try off-hours pick-up of your shipments and save up to 30%.

Minitab's Supply Chain Module provides tools to investigate freight cost per unit. Consider a Correlogram to investigate continuous factors such as freight cost, time to load a shipment, load weight, and dunnage weight. 

You can also create a Heatmap to investigate categorical factors such as product, shipping carrier, scheduled pick-up times, and whether you have a shipping contract or shipping incentives. 

Freight Bill Accuracy

Also, if you do not regularly check the freight bill accuracy, you should. Companies report frequent errors with incorrect weight charges, incorrect freight class codes, duplicate invoices, as well as overlooked discounts. It's worth it to check.

Minitab's Supply Chain Module provides many tools to investigate freight bill accuracy. A Pareto Chart of freight bill errors is a great starting point. A more complicated analysis would be a CART Classification Tree. Minitab offers both and many other tools to help you investigate, communicate, and reduce freight bill errors.

Talk to Minitab today to learn more about how our software can save your company money.