Stop the One-Stop-Shop: Choosing Purpose-Fit Solutions
Logistics service providers and freight forwarders often demand solutions that can adapt to diverse markets and complex challenges. Yet, the quest for a single platform to manage it all can often lead to inefficiencies, complexities and missed opportunities. This blog delves into why fit-for-purpose solutions are the way forward for businesses who wants to achieve success, efficiency and scalability.
Stop the One-Stop-Shop
Many companies, big and small, are drawn to the promise of a “one-stop-shop” platform—an all-encompassing solution to unify operations. Potentially managed by a single IT team somewhere central, but far removed from the proverbial shop floor. While appealing, this approach often results in rigid systems that fail to address specific needs, have long expensive (risky) implementations, intense training requirements, and poor adaptability to local markets.
Instead, companies should adopt fit-for-purpose solutions, tailored to specific functions, regions, or workflows. By pairing these solutions with strategically placed network management systems, businesses can balance agility with centralised oversight, enabling quicker implementation and enhanced responsiveness to local requirements. If some parts don't quite fit? Simply replace the specific solution, without touching the rest of your solutions and teams.
One-Size fits No One
1. Lack of Local Adaptability
Global platforms often overlook local nuances. A transportation company in Southeast Asia operates differently from one in Europe, and forcing both into a monolithic system can lead to inefficiencies and poor adoption - or what about dealing with customs, that surely is a very local affair.
2. Complex and Slow Rollouts
Large systems demand significant customisation and time to implement, delaying results and tying up resources - and it often leads to ‘one-size fits no one’. These implementations can take multiple years, with most being up to two years according to Gartner and even then about 60% of such implementations fail! (ERP Focus).
3. High Training Overhead
Rolling out a single platform organization-wide often requires extensive training, impacting productivity across teams. Combined with the second point, it often means that teams are trained months before actually touching any production ready software in the real-world.
4. Challenges with Low-Tech Partners
Expecting small or local partners to adopt a complex enterprise solution is often unrealistic. These partners may lack the technical resources or capacity to integrate with such systems.
Why Fit-for-Purpose Works
1. Agility and Focus
Fit-for-purpose solutions are designed to meet specific needs, allowing teams to adapt quickly without unnecessary complexity.
2. Faster Implementation
Smaller, focused tools can be deployed rapidly, minimising disruption and accelerating results.
3. Reduced Training Requirements
These solutions are simpler to adopt, requiring only the relevant teams to learn the tool, not the entire organization - as most of these systems are just more tailored to the task at hand, instead of being a jack-of-all-trades (Howuku).
4. Improved Partner Collaboration
Fit-for-purpose tools make it easier for enterprises to work with low- or no-tech external partners, bridging gaps in capabilities and ensuring smooth operations - A real necessity for companies dealing in South-East Asia.
The Role of Network Management
To connect localised solutions with enterprise systems, aggregators or network managers act as intermediaries. These tools collect data from diverse systems and funnel it into a centralised platform, maintaining a balance between localised operations and enterprise-wide oversight.
Key benefits include:
- Interoperability: Seamlessly integrates with different tools and systems.
- Scalability: Grows alongside the business.
- Unified Reporting: Provides a consolidated view without sacrificing localised adaptability.
Real-World Example
Consider the case of a huge Indonesian paper provider that wanted to start tracking and performance managing their expansive network of transport carriers. Sure, their ERP vendor could provide transportation management solutions and sure they could provide an app for local drivers to complete their tasks, however upon closer inspection:
- The ERP provider could not deal with sparse or limited data connectivity for parts of the daily driver journey - so drivers had to track their actions on paper, until they were in cell range.
- The vendor could not integrate with a local, on ground, gate pass & access management system - requiring drivers to still be manually registered for access and departure.
- The vendor could not guarantee any turnaround time of less than 48 months on any feature request - because there is obviously a centrally set product roadmap that only serves the most common needs of their many thousands of customers.
So in this case, at the highest level, the large vendor ticked all boxes but quickly fell apart during local trials when the lack of integration opportunities, steep learning curve, and limited functionality only add additional work instead of optimising or simplifying day-to-day operations.
Conclusion
The “one-stop-shop” platform may sound ideal, but it often creates more problems than it solves - as it oversimplifies the problems it sets out to solve and ignores local rules. By adopting fit-for-purpose solutions and leveraging strategically placed network managers, enterprises can stay agile, responsive, and scalable. This approach minimises disruptions, accelerates deployments, and fosters better collaboration with external partners. It’s time to stop chasing the myth of one system to rule them all and start building a tailored, efficient tech landscape that works for your business.
We're happy to discuss how we recently successfully connected a large customer with their more than 200 transportation carrier partners and feed all their delivery and performance data back into a well known three letter enterprise platform - based on a single software integration.
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