In the ocean transportation industry, exceptions can happen and exceptions can hurt.

Whether the exception occurs on land or on the water, tight margins mean that unrecognized issues may affect profits because of delay, or worse, may affect gains from multiple shipments.

If you have calculated only a couple hundred dollars of profit on a shipment, $100 extra in storage fees per day, or $250 for a transport dry run could hurt your operations. Once a shipment is off-schedule, there are several ways that things can go wrong so each job needs to be considered as having the potential to affect profit.

While short-term revenue loss is a major consideration, regular exceptions can also have damaging long-term effects on your brand, customer satisfaction levels, and the ability to retain or grow your business.

Keeping on Top of Trouble
In an effort to combat this, your staff may attempt to manually track their containerized shipments by going to the ocean carriers’ websites and individually chasing the information they need. While this certainly helps, it is labor intensive for the staff involved and data quality issues can arise through repetitive manual entry.

Whether an exception happens during business hours, over the weekend, or when your staff are busy with other tasks, how can your business be sure that problems are recognized early and acted upon in a timely manner? If a client knows that an exception has occurred before you do, that could harm your business relationship.

Automation is Key
Automating the exception management processes is one solution to address these issues. Being able to automatically alert staff when an exception occurs puts you in control and allows you to be proactive rather than reactive.

So how do you create these automated processes? At WiseTech Global, we realize that the most efficient and effective solution requires shipment tracking data to flow into your systems automatically. This provides your staff with consistent, accurate, and timely information when they need it, wherever they are.

Moving Towards an Exception Free Future
It’s time to move away from inconsistent and costly manual exception management practices. Using automated exception management can minimize the negative effects of exceptions and deliver an enhanced level of customer service. Happy customer testimonials can assist in both retaining and growing your market share.

Depending on the size of your business, automated exception management may only require a small amount of effort to implement and run across your operations. When problems arise, how you handle them defines your business—don’t be left sitting on the dock.

Mike DeAngelis is WiseTech Global’s senior vice president of global carrier strategy and digitization.