The last few years have required Shippers to increase the number of Carriers they work with. In lockstep, this has often meant accepting new workflows to mitigate the risk of errors. Said differently, every time a Shipper begins working with a new Carrier, that Shipper needs to revise or add another workflow into their day-to-day operations.
It’s untenable. It’s unscalable. And it’s rife with errors.
To alleviate these issues, we’ve recently expanded the ways in which we can accept Delivery Orders, to more easily align with the way our Shippers operate. Our most recent enhancement simplifies the DO submission process for all of our Shippers by allowing automated DO ingestion via CSV file in the NEXT Shipper portal.
This is not meant to replace EDI or API Delivery Order ingestion that is already established. Instead, it is built for the Shippers who still use spreadsheets (and perhaps haven’t migrated to an EDI or API approach yet) and need the flexibility to submit, monitor, and manage their DOs on their own schedule.
The NEXT DO CSV template can be easily populated from the spreadsheets Shippers are already using. Better yet, a single CSV file can be used to push hundreds of containers across multiple MBOLs to NEXT, saving countless hours of manual data entry and having to create multiple Delivery Order documents.
Once uploaded into the Shipper portal, the CSV file is also the single source of truth for the container shipments, helping to prevent any downstream errors. As always, Shippers receive complete transparency into the approval status of the Delivery Order. Once approved, all container shipments are automatically created and available with their current terminal status on the “Your Containers” page for visibility and tracking.
We love to help our Shippers get to the next level in their business and see CSV file ingestion for Delivery Orders as an automation starter kit, laying the groundwork for a Shipper’s likely shift to EDI (or API) as they grow.
