Solutions should not be more complicated than the problems they are trying to solve!

Shippers have two years to make the change or risk competitive obsolescence

Bohemia, NY - As efficiencies in technology move through the transportation community, the time-consuming and costly process of producing, distributing, and managing a routing guide has been made fully automatic and economically insignificant.  A new technology, which promises to eliminate most paper routing guides by 2004, can be accessed through the web at www.routingguides.com.  It enables users to post and manage routing and vendor compliance instructions on the web with immediate communications to vendors.  The technology also enables companies to replace slow-moving paper documents with electronic Advance Shipment Notifications, Bills of Lading, tracing, tracking, and other reports.

And the technology works for extraordinary shipments as well.  When a standard route assignment has not been issued for an extraordinary shipment, vendors and customers can fill out a “route request” form that will automatically direct the shipment parameters to a routing desk via email or the RoutingGuides desktop management tool instead of the labor-intensive call-in process where vendors and customers required instant routings to satisfy demand.  In this way, users eliminate untimely, interruptive phone calls that impact their workflow because all of the necessary shipment information is presented to them electronically.

Routing guides are primary transportation management tools.  They enable shippers to ensure that their vendors and customers are using the carriers, rates and services that they negotiated.  They also enable shippers to maintain a manageable number of delivering carriers to maximize efficiencies of the freight receiving process.  However, more than any other supply chain tool, the War and Peace -sized printed routing manuals are universally considered a headache by shippers who have to update, print, and distribute them, and by vendors who have to comply with their complicated instructions.

In the past, shippers would imbed routing guides within a Vendor Compliance or Instructions manual.  Shippers, their vendors, customers and carriers then used the guides as a source of total information surrounding the rules of engagement between the buyer and seller. Instructions required at each point in the logistics process would be located and identified, and the manual would pass through many hands as supplies and finished products moved along the supply chain.  Because neither content nor form was standardized, exceptions and changes were difficult to identify.

RoutingGuides.com enables shippers to simplify this entire process and concurrently leverage all shipment volumes to drive down transportation costs.  It identifies a shippers choice of carriers to be used for shipments of merchandise varying in weight and service, and it identifies all shipping, packing, marking, and communications requirements as well.  RoutingGuides.com also provides transit times, delivery requests and links between shipping and inventory.

“It is all about time, cost and control,” said Alan Miller, president of RoutingGuides.com.  “With the web, everything concerning routing guides is simplified.  It’s just not worth the effort to produce routing guides the old fashioned, paper way.”

RoutingGuides.com is a new company that formed for the express purpose of offering an electronic alternative to one of the largest headaches in the supply chain.  In this day and age of spot rates, one-off shipments and a trend towards dynamic transportation pricing, transportation managers and buyers require an efficient tool to instantly notify their vendors and customers of changes.  In the process of eliminating paper, RoutingGuides.com also made compliance totally visible and updates immediate, all at a fraction of the cost necessary to maintain the obsolete paper guides.