Operations

ProShip shipping expert, Clint Boaz, shares 3 shipping platform must-haves for peak season success

Peak season is around the corner. Demand is high, and so are the stakes for meeting customer expectations and your business objectives. Does your shipping system have what it takes to calculate shipping rates, choose the best carrier, and compliantly label the loads of shipments you are facing with increased demand?

Whether your peak season occurs on the traditional year-end holiday schedule or elsewhere on the calendar, you need to be ready. Here are three key considerations when choosing a high-performance shipping platform that will make pushing out all those peak season shipments a breeze.

1) Speed: Carrier APIs vs On-Platform Engines

When deploying multi-carrier shipping technology, there are two choices for how a system deploys functionality for quoting shipping rates, printing compliant labels, and communicating electronically with the shipping carriers: carrier web APIs and platform engines.

What’s the difference?

The major parcel carriers publish and host carrier web APIs that are free to use by the public. Many shipping platform vendors take the easy route and simply aggregate these free public carrier APIs into a single interface. While the APIs will quote rates and produce labels, they leave much to be desired when milliseconds count and when you must alter your workflow to match their limited abilities.

Every year during peak season the APIs experience slowdowns and outages. During Cyber Monday of 2024, a couple of the APIs from major carriers offered wait times of 1 to 6 seconds. This can feel like an eternity when your operators, automation equipment, and batch processes are pushing through punishing volumes. You should not need to make up for this deficiency through inefficient workarounds like preprocessing shipping requests before your operators need the shipping labels.

A platform engine means that the multi-carrier software provider has developed their own carrier-compliant components that quote accurate rates and print shipping labels without reliance on external APIs. This allows all processing to be done within the shipping platform in milliseconds. It means you get a result back at lightning-fast speeds, but it also allows you to compare rates and print shipping labels in real time without operational workarounds or pre-modeling guesswork. [Learn more about how carrier APIs differ from on-platform carrier engines.]

Both carrier APIs and platform engines do have relative advantages. Be sure to partner with a solution provider who can offer a hybrid approach to leverage the best of both worlds.

2) Automation: Integration Capabilities

A shipping system with the best compliance and fastest speed means nothing if it is not connected to your critical business systems like Order Management Systems (OMS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) at the right touch points.

The system must consume order data for accurate shipment processing and write back resultant shipment data for visibility. This may mean rate shopping and printing labels during order entry, warehouse waving, packing, print-and-apply equipment scans, and storing results in data analytics platforms. The shipping system should not restrain you in terms of which systems it can connect to, how many systems, the method of connecting to these systems, and when it can connect.

This requires the work of an experienced implementation team who has seen it all. A team who can work with your operations and systems personnel to map out happy path and exception handling workflows regardless of shipment type: domestic, international, multipiece, hazmat, LTL, etc. This ensures that when the curtain rises on peak season, the show can go on without a hitch. Good implementation practices and skilled engineers make or break it when the pressure is on. [Uncover three important lessons for supply chain strategy implementations.]

3) Accuracy: Business Rules

Let’s face it, your business is unique—if it weren’t, everyone would be doing it. This means your way of shipping is unique, and you have business rules that prescribe what carrier service to use, what documents to print, what shipping charges to apply, and when to do all these things. The system should not limit rule sets to simple if-then pairings but allow for full algorithmic logic in the prescribed order of operations.

Also, remember that this is a lot of thinking to ask a system to do. It must be fast and do it efficiently, especially when it must do it in real time, thousands of times a day. Well-defined, well-organized logic compiled into memory is crucial for a highly performing shipping system, especially considering all the other things like rating, printing, and data sharing it must do at the same time. This ensures that not only are the shipments executed flawlessly, but that your system can handle the volume during the most demanding time of the year and time of day in a way that is compliant both with the shipping carriers and with your own business requirements.

Remember, speed isn’t a “nice to have,” it’s essential and should be a focal point of your evaluation.

These are three important considerations when evaluating a high-performance shipping system that will let you cruise through peak season. As always, ProShip is glad to share more and demonstrate our unmatched system performance and flexibility. Contact our team of shipping experts today, or schedule a pressure-free discovery call. Happy shipping!