Transportation and Logistics    
 
The transportation and distribution world is a rapidly changing landscape marked by unprecedented complexity. Increased global trade makes logistics supply chains even longer and more dynamic, and customer expectations continue to rise. Whether shipping from Chicago or Shanghai, companies must be able to collaborate more effectively with their key trading partners—carriers, suppliers, or customers—to drive maximum efficiencies while delivering world-class service. Consequently, organizations must consider these business processes more strategically and look for more refined and adaptable closed-loop solutions.

i2 solutions for transportation and distribution have been designed and proven to empower transportation as a strategic enterprise by enabling industry best practices in the areas of design, procurement, planning, execution, and visibility. These solutions consistently create quantifiable value by synchronizing those critical transportation and distribution processes across multiple modes, enterprises, and borders, while driving optimal operating efficiencies and greater service performance.
 
Key challenges faced by the transportation and distribution industry can include:

Rising profitability pressures including increased fuel costs, driving hours-of-service regulations, and new regulatory mandates driven by security, which can have a large impact on profit margin
Severe capacity issues including a shortage of drivers and equipment and an imbalance in freight flows driven by global sourcing
Greater need for inbound and outbound freight visibility and control on a global basis
Increasing customer expectations for transportation performance including expectations of 99.9% on-time delivery performance, reduced damage-in-transit, flexibility and ability to adapt to order changes, and order and shipment visibility
Traditionally, transportation and distribution companies focused on:

Short-term cost reduction
Adversarial shipper-carrier relations
Distributed planning and execution
Manual processes with minimal automation
Operational silos across inbound and outbound transportation management
Reactive approach to managing exceptions and service disruptions
Cost-centered business model
Today, transportation and distribution companies must focus on:

Emerging transportation practices
Sustainable cost-service optimization
Collaborative shipper-carrier partnerships
Centralized planning, localized execution
Integrated inbound, outbound, and inter-facility transportation management
Proactive and automated monitoring and resolution of exceptions and service disruptions
Profit-center business model that can be leveraged as a strategic weapon