We are experiencing a huge shift in consumer mindset as customers have become more interested in a company’s process over its product. This is particularly true in the nearly $500+ billion cosmetics industry, which does much to improve a person’s sense of self and wellbeing, but also has a great deal of waste taking a…
Category: Shippers
Consumers are in overdrive, but factories are stalling in second gear
Consumer spending hit new highs in September while the industrial sector stabilized, but ultimately failed to recover its pre-crisis momentum. Data published this morning by the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board beg the question: How durable is the economic recovery if America’s consumers are in overdrive, but its factories are stalling in second…
How is my operations team doing? Steps to building a well balanced scorecard.
In this article, we’ll explore how to create a well-balanced set of operational metrics that you can implement in your own business. Like all businesses, Convoy has many stakeholders with different priorities. Shippers care about trucks being on time, good communication, and fair prices. Carriers also care about fair prices, strong relationships, and access to…
Aether Beauty’s Tiila Abbitt: Leading The Zero Waste Beauty Revolution
When the question of integrating sustainability into your business arises, there are many considerations to be made because it has an impact on nearly every part of a company. Are you working to uphold corporate sustainability and do good in the communities where you operate? And what about for the people who work for your…
Appointment scheduling discounts: Save time when you need to, save money when you want to.
If there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that shippers need more flexibility and control than ever before — flexibility to make the right choice, at the right time, in fluctuating market conditions, and more control over costs and quality outcomes to drive bottom-line results. As part of our ongoing effort to increase pricing…
Fair Trade USA’s Amy Blyth: Partnering To Drive Impact
The concept of “fair trade” is based upon the philosophy that products bought and sold are connected to the livelihoods of others. By certifying businesses as “fair trade,” everyone involved is making a choice to support responsible companies; empower farmers, workers, and fishermen; and protect the environment. To learn more about the fair trade movement,…
Three Benefits of Automated Tender Responses for Contract Freight
When freight markets are tight and your primary carrier rejects a tender, every minute counts. Our recent blog post on healthy routing guides shared that best-in-class carriers (those who were rewarded by repeated freight) had a 33-minute median tender response time, while the same metric for the lowest-performing carriers was 58 minutes. Today, we’re sharing…
Don’t Blame Construction for the Trucker Shortage
The labor market recovery continued (though at a slowing pace) in September and headlines toward the end of the month suggest that the official payroll and survey data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau may not yet capture accelerating layoffs in the travel, hospitality and recreation sectors — which are bracing…
Samsonite’s Christine Riley Miller: The First Global Head of Sustainability
There can be any number of reasons an organization is driven to adopt a sustainability platform. Publicly traded companies, for example, may be required to publish an annual report on sustainability initiatives. Other catalysts could include new C-level talent coming on board who have a sustainability mindset or ongoing customer inquiries as to what a…
Griffith Foods’ Katherine Pickus On Redefining Sustainability
In today’s global marketplace, there is no longer a question of whether a company can afford to have a sustainability mission. The space is moving so fast, we have moved well past the possibility of a sustainability goal and fast forwarded to how impactful an organization’s sustainability policies actually are. This is evolving so quickly…
Introducing Guaranteed Primary
Today I am excited to introduce Convoy Guaranteed Primary, a new, industry-first pricing program for primary freight RFPs that reduces a shipper’s total cost by up to 19% while guaranteeing capacity. Guaranteed Primary eliminates the win-lose dynamic of traditional RFPs. It provides shippers with a fixed margin that can be up to 50% lower than…
Key Learnings from Factory and Retail Data
Government data released this week provided the latest official read on the state of U.S. factories and consumers — two critical pillars of freight demand. Outside seemingly omnipresent natural disaster zones, freight demand has been distinctly cooler in early September, though relative to historic norms it remains strong. As consumption and production patterns settle into a…
Free People’s Julie Verdugo: Sustainability in Practice
It is a frequent point of debate in boardrooms around the world: Should we incorporate sustainability into our business and how much is it going to cost? For many organizations, sustainability and the broader query of social impact seem separate, but the reality is they are very intertwined. How does your product or service impact…
Grove Collaborative’s Danielle Jezienicki: When Sustainability Is A Core Part Of A Company’s Foundation
Sustainability can truly become harmonious with a business when it is an integral pillar of a company’s DNA versus being an afterthought. When sustainability is literally baked into the brand, then how a company operates, everything it produces, its policies and procedures, interactions with suppliers and vendors, etc. are all viewed through a sustainability lens…
What the August Employment Report didn’t tell us about trucking jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) monthly Employment Situation Report is widely recognized as the most authoritative portrait of real-time economic activity. But for the freight industry, the report provides an incomplete snapshot of the state of trucker employment. This morning’s data showed a 0.7% (10,000, seasonally adjusted) increase in truck transportation jobs in August…
3 types of supply chain risk (and how to manage them)
Every day, logistics teams respond to unpredictable shifts in demand for their companies’ goods. As consumer expectations rise, so do the requirements on supply chain performance. As supply chains become more connected and complex, so do the points of vulnerability to disruption.
Embedding Sustainability Into Founding Principles
Sustainability in business — exactly how can it be established, managed, and monitored? For companies starting up circa 2020, sustainability can be a huge component of their founding mission. But for others who have been around for quite some time, how do you begin to incorporate sustainability into operations, policies, procedures, and overall mindset where…
Want to lower freight costs? Look to your routing guide
With a tightening freight market and rising truckload rates, logistics teams are looking to get more reliable coverage and reduce freight costs. If you’re dealing with rising tender rejections on your contract freight, it might be time to take a closer look at your routing guide.
Four ways Convoy helps simplify small business shipping
We’ve talked to hundreds of people working for transportation teams at small companies. One of the most common things we hear is that they “wear many hats” and can be responsible for everything from quoting customers, to getting shipments covered, to reconciling invoices. Convoy helps simplify the entire logistics workflow by providing tools and technology…
Making Common Sense A Business Value
Sustainability in business is defined as operating an enterprise which has minimal negative impact on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy. Quite often, the “Sustainability” umbrella encompasses Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which refers to a company’s commitment to be good stewards of the environmental and social landscape in which they operate. CSR…
