The transport sector operates to extremely tight profit margins and timescales. Customers expect deliveries and travel to happen on time and when they want.
With current competition and fuel prices rising rapidly, companies need to manage their business processes as tightly and efficiently as possible. Document Management should form a major part of any transport businesses drive for efficiency and effectiveness.
Compliance
Transport and logistics companies deal with (and generate) huge volumes of paperwork daily; in particular, financial documentation such as invoices, account records, legal documents and staff information. With VOSA, and other regulatory bodies keeping an ever-watchful eye on the transport and logistics sector, managing data and documents successfully is vital in terms of compliance as well as economics.
Compliance typically means doing things in a certain way – managing and maintaining data as evidence that all required actions have been taken. Maintaining documents is a key component of compliance management. Electronic data management systems can help ensure that compliance requirements are met by providing facilities such as templates, checklists, triggers and automated alerts.
Reduce Paper Handling
Effective document management means less paper handling – breaking logistical borders with documents being shared across geographically disparate operations without physical mailing costs, effort and delays.
It also provides a solution for historically difficult or awkward processes, such as billing and invoicing. Converting documents to a digital format enables easy, stress free processing and auto-archiving afterwards.
Did you know, a single piece of paper is copied an average of 5 times in most businesses? An automated process for storing, saving and sending information will save time, money and improve the overall efficiency of your transport business.
Improve Efficiency
It’s not only large hauliers that benefit from robust business processes and proficient document management. Smaller courier and transport businesses can benefit from the efficiency savings this affords. Physically sending paperwork to different departments, offices or countries creates a bottleneck, meaning unnecessary delays and an inevitable financial loss as a result.
Cloud, Hosted or on Premises?
It’s easy to see why so many transport businesses are opting for cloud based document storage solutions. Endless capacity, online tracking, searching retrieval and editing – all are now possible through cloud storage, but this may not be the right solution for your unique business requirements, preference or budget.
It pays to look for the document management company that offers you a choice, or combination of each, according to your business needs.
This article was written by Kathryn Thompson, a freelance writer specialising in the engineering asset management lifecycle and industry document management solutions.
