Going for the Green: Achieving Sustainability and Profit Goals in Transportation

Often, the concepts of “sustainability” and “profitability” are considered mutually exclusive. But technological solutions are turning that idea on its head.

After meeting our partners at 3G Pacejet, I learned this is particularly true for today’s construction firms, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.

These businesses face many challenges, including supply chain volatility, the seemingly never-ending rise in fuel costs, and the pressures of achieving and maintaining environmental sustainability while staying profitable. But it is possible to “go green” and “make green” at the same time. To achieve your sustainability objectives and profit goals, you just need to follow what we’ll call “The Select-Pack-Ship Model.”

Select

It all starts with selecting the right tech systems that will give you all the capabilities you need to manage your business at both the big-picture and granular levels.

But you don’t want to implement just any solution that promises business process improvements. Instead, it’s best to partner with reputable technology vendors that have proven themselves to be not only tech innovators but also committed champions of sustainability.

You need a base business management platform from a vendor that is dedicated to promoting sustainable corporate practices, holding itself accountable to measurable outcomes, and making the world a better place. You need a shipping software solution that will help you ship more with less—using automation to eliminate the human errors and extra steps that waste time, rack up fuel emissions, and eat into your bottom line.

Together, Acumatica Cloud ERP and 3G Pacejet Shipping do all this and more.

Pack

After selecting the right software, it’s time to apply it to the order packing process. The 3G Transportation Management Suite, available through the Acumatica Marketplace, seamlessly integrates with the Acumatica Cloud ERP system to make packing more efficient, and efficiency is key to both sustainability and profitability. Acumatica and 3G Pacejet help companies like yours:

• Consolidate Packages: One of the biggest hurdles to sustainable, profitable shipping is figuring out how to pack cargo so that it gets to the customer on time, doesn’t cost an exorbitant amount to ship, and doesn’t leave the company in over its head in greenhouse emissions debt. Acumatica and 3G Pacejet are purposely built to circumvent this issue, giving users the tools they need to track customer and order data, consolidate loads with common destinations into fewer shipping boxes, pack more goods onto single pallets, and use fewer trucks filled with more product. This means customers get what they’ve ordered when they expect to get it; companies can get the same work done with fewer steps; and fossil fuel emissions are reduced accordingly.
• Predictive Packaging: It’s happened to all of us at some point. You order something, and it arrives sliding around inside a box that would have easily held something five times its size. For trucking and shipping companies, package sizes should never be a guesstimate. 3G Pacejet takes the item data stored in Acumatica Cloud ERP and uses it in smart, configurable predictive packing algorithms to estimate package weights and dimensions and determine how many boxes or pallets should be used for each shipment. This, of course, lessens the possibility of having to pay surprise shipping charges if a package weighs more than an inaccurate guesstimate suggested, but it also eliminates excess packaging and waste.
• Scan-Packing & Address Validation: Validating customer, label, and bill of lading information is an essential part of the packing process. Acumatica is a single source of truth for a business’s transactional data, and 3G Pacejet automatically taps into that data to make sure all package information is accurate. This keeps packages from having to take multiple, unnecessary trips between distribution centers and the final destination because of address errors or labeling issues. So, satisfied customers receive their orders on time, and companies eliminate the greenhouse emissions these extra trips would generate.

Ship

After the selecting and the packing comes the culmination of this process: the actual shipping. Your work doesn’t stop when an order is packed and ready to leave your facilities, and neither does the work of Acumatica and 3G Pacejet. The integrated solutions will be there to help you:

• Route Shipments: Easily manage every move for every order every time. For over-the-road (OTR) trucking, 3G uses Acumatica data to help companies make informed route plans, like “complex multi-stop TL [truckload], direct, LTL [less-than-truckload], pool-point, cross-dock, round-trips, [and] what-if plans,” that “maximize every cubic inch of capacity and gallon of diesel.” This means the system can operate at different levels of OTR efficiency to fill the requirements for each shipment, and companies can have fewer trucks on the road making long-haul drives.
• Choose Carriers: With 3G Pacejet’s dynamic carrier sourcing features linked to Acumatica, you can maintain complete profiles for every carrier you use, add information on their sustainability practices, manage contracts, and add new carriers as needed.
• Drop-Ship: Drop-shipping has become a powerful form of sustainable fulfillment logistics. Acumatica and 3G Pacejet make it easy for you to gather orders from retailers and then ship those products directly to end customers. This means both you and the retailers can bypass unnecessary trips to central distribution facilities, lowering the overall carbon impact of multiple businesses at once.

Sustainable Profit with Acumatica and 3G Pacejet

Sustainability and profitability go hand-in-hand, as do Acumatica and 3G Pacejet—with capabilities to help you “go for the green” to protect our planet and to boost your bottom line. To learn more about Acumatica’s commitment to sustainability, which guides every decision the company makes, check out our AcumatiCares program. To learn more about 3G Pacejet and its commitment to building partnerships with customers, providing a reliable infrastructure, and setting companies up for agility and success, read about the 3G difference. Explore what Acumatica Cloud ERP and 3G Pacejet can do to fill your company’s unique needs, today.

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