How Visibility Aids Retail Shippers in Loss Prevention

In today's global economy, retail supply chain executives are required to navigate many pressing challenges, including retail loss prevention. In many cases, though, using the right freight shipping visibility solutions can mitigate these challenges or avoid them altogether. Here we will look at the top challenges facing the retail shipping industry and discuss how freight visibility can overcome them. With these insights, you can determine which solutions can best help your company develop a more reliable and cost-effective retail supply chain.

Top Challenges Facing Retail Supply Chain Executives

Working as a supply chain executive and overseeing retail shipping has never been easy. Faced with rising prices, labor and supply shortages, and growing sources of supply chain disruption, though, succeeding as a retail supply chain executive is now more challenging than ever. Here are some of the top challenges that retail supply chain executives face.

Retail Loss Prevention

According to Packaging Digest, as much as 11% of cargo is damaged in transit, amounting to a substantial expense for many companies. Companies that sell perishable or fragile products are especially vulnerable to losses due to damaged freight. For these companies, an effective retail loss prevention strategy is a vital yet challenging element of supply chain management.

Forecasting and Inventory Management

Forecasting product demand to execute an optimized inventory management strategy requires retail supply chain executives to form an in-depth understanding of what is flowing through their supply chain in real-time. As supply chains and retail shipping become increasingly complex, this becomes more and more difficult to do.

Cost Reduction

With prices rising across the board, the relentless need for cost reduction weighs heavy on the mind of almost every retail supply chain manager. When it's more expensive than ever to purchase and ship products, optimizing a supply chain for cost-effectiveness and retail loss prevention becomes even more vital.

Supply Chain Disruption

Today, supply chain disruption can come in a variety of forms. Any retail supply chain manager who had the misfortune of seeing their supply chain through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic knows just how sudden, unpredictable, and destructive supply chain disruption can be to retail shipping. Even now that the pandemic is winding down, its impact on global supply chains is not. Labor shortages created by the pandemic have made it especially challenging for retailers to avoid supply chain disruption, and there's no predicting what the next source of trouble will be.

What Does Visibility Mean for Retail Loss Prevention and Supply Chain Management?

Before diving into how retail supply chain visibility helps solve the challenges outlined above, it is first important to define what visibility means for supply chain managers and its role in retail loss prevention. In the most basic sense, visibility means the ability to track the location and status of your products throughout the supply chain. For many retail companies, visibility also means tracking shipment conditions and ensuring that cargo does not incur any damage in transit. Supply chain visibility can also mean visibility into retail shipping processes, creating more transparency and making it easier for supply chain managers to understand what's going on within their supply chain.

The Benefits of Freight Shipping Visibility Solutions

Next, let's consider the benefits that freight shipping visibility solutions provide and the challenges they help retail supply chain managers overcome.

For starters, demand forecasting and inventory management become much more straightforward when supply chain executives can accurately determine when their purchase orders will arrive. The ability to track the hyper-accurate location and status of shipments in real-time using a freight shipping visibility solution such as Tive’s can vastly improve a company's inventory management processes.

Meanwhile, shipment condition visibility solutions can go a long way toward assisting with a retail loss prevention strategy. Along with helping companies pinpoint damaged products and ensure that they don't make it into customers’ hands, real-time shipment condition trackers also enable supply chain managers to determine common sources of damage and develop solutions to mitigate them.

Retail loss prevention, of course, plays an important role in cost reduction. Along with cutting costs by reducing damage rates, though, supply chain visibility solutions also enable executives to analyze their supply chain more efficiently to determine areas of inefficiency where there is room for further cost reduction.

Lastly, freight shipping visibility solutions help retail supply chain managers avoid disruption by quickly alerting them when exceptions occur and enabling them to create a more transparent and agile supply chain that makes it easier to pivot to alternative solutions when disruption happens.

How Tive's GPS Trackers Provide Complete Freight Shipping Visibility

Tive's industry-leading GPS trackers enable retail supply chain managers to track their cargo’s location, status, and conditions in real-time. Along with providing timely and accurate updates about when cargo will arrive, Tive's solution also enables companies to monitor shipment conditions such as temperature, humidity, light exposure, and shock absorption.

Tive helps retail supply chain managers solve many of their most pressing challenges, including loss prevention, cost reduction, and inventory management, by providing complete real-time visibility into any cargo's location and its conditions.

Improve Retail Shipping Outcomes with Tive’s Freight Visibility Solutions

As the challenges faced by today's retail supply chain executives grow increasingly more urgent and complex, the silver lining is that freight visibility solutions are getting better and better at solving them—including retail loss prevention. these challenges. If you would like to learn more about Tive's real-time visibility solution can help your retail company achieve complete transportation visibility, contact us today!

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