Expert advice: optimising your shipments

There are four main categories of service. Firstly « urgent », where an individual service is set up to transport a parcel or letter. This type of solution is very costly (several thousand euros) because the client does not benefit from scale economies. It should be kept, for example, for forwarding a part needed to get a factory up and running again. Then there is « express ». This relies on air networks and has grown considerably since the 1980s. It includes two main product families: morning delivery services and the classic express service with delivery during the day with no time limit.

The delivery is known as D+1, that is to say the next working day for European destinations, and even the USA, or D+2 or D+3 for Asia or other world economic centres. Another category is « rapid »: a parcel sent by lorry rather than plane costs half as much yet there is still the same level of reliability as with an express delivery. Indeed, several express delivery companies offer reliable services with guaranteed delivery times, and these are much less expensive than the traditional express service. Finally, the « economic » service offers services that correspond to the traditional postal services or subcontracted parcel services. These products should be reserved for personal or non-strategic use rather than for Business-to-Business dispatches.

The 3 stages of optimising a transport budget

1 Analyse your needs
Many companies use express to compensate for a lack of in-house organisation. The question to ask is whether or not parcels sent express could not have been sent the day before, or whether clients would not prefer to wait an extra day and pay several tens of euros less.
You have to know, therefore, what the real needs of clients and users are in order to choose services with the cost/delivery date ratio most suited to your transport flows.

2 - Choose a carrier carefully
Identify the type of dispatches you make most frequently and compare the prices and delivery dates of providers for each type, basing the calculation on recent invoices.The site www.tarif-colis.com allows you to simulate in less than a minute the cost of a shipment using the services of the five leaders on the express market: Chronopost, DHL, FedEX, TNT and UPS.

3 - Analyse your invoices
You should check the surcharges applied and identify the shipments and destinations that cost the most.

Lastly, you should know that shipments delivered late through the fault of the carrier can, on request, give rise to a reimbursement of transport costs.