Are You Maximizing Your Technology ROI? Answer These Five Questions

If you’re a logistics leader, then you’re probably already using advanced software to optimize your performance.

Transportation management, warehouse management, trade management, and other systems are purpose-built to dynamically adjust your operations to today’s fast-changing supply chain landscape. These powerful software solutions gather and share real-time data, connect your teams, identify disruptions, and keep your supply chain on track, continuously and profitably.

But how well are you applying these advanced solutions every day? Are you maximizing your return on your technology investments and capturing all the software’s benefits?

As a modern 4PL, Redwood excels at optimizing your use of physical supply chain assets like warehouses, trucks, inventory, and labor. But we have equal expertise in optimizing your use of advanced technology. We’ve managed hundreds of successful technology implementations, upgrades, and customizations. Our goal is to ensure our customers’ digital assets are optimizing their physical assets—and maximizing their financial returns on all their supply chain investments.

Based on our deep experience, we’ve recognized five signs you may not be getting the maximum benefits from your technology solutions. Answer these five simple questions to see if you can increase the return on investment (ROI) for your logistics software and systems.

1. Are you still doing workarounds in spreadsheets or email?

We get it, it can be hard to let go of older ways of sharing information and working across teams. But modern logistics software is designed specifically to replace manual work and slow, tedious processes with speed and automation. They can accomplish data-sharing, alerting, prioritization, and cross-functional communication far faster and more accurately than humans. That not only increases the speed and quality of your daily decisions, but it ensures all your processes and teams are aligned around shared goals, even in today’s dynamic landscape. Manual workarounds simply can’t keep up with the pace of logistics change today. Trusting the software and digitizing all your processes is an easy way to get a greater return on your technology solutions, while also improving your efficiency and real-time responsiveness.

2. Are you using the software’s full functionality?

After a go-live, it’s exciting to see the huge improvements and changes enabled by logistics software. It’s easy to rest on your laurels and think you’ve accomplished a successful digital transformation. But it’s important to continuously take stock of where you are post-implementation. Are you using all the modules, features, and functionality you’re paying for? Based on our experience, we can say with 100% confidence that there’s undiscovered value in your software investments. Modern logistics software is designed to optimize just about every facet of your operations. If you’re not using its full functionality to ingest and analyze data, improve real-time visibility and control, and automate both processes and decisions, then you’re missing out. Work with an expert 4PL who knows both logistics operations and logistics software, inside and out. Redwood can perfectly match your software’s powerful capabilities to your pressing daily challenges, to ensure you’re realizing all the value you’re paying for.

3. As you’ve grown, has your tech footprint kept pace?

Growth is an amazing thing, especially in today’s challenging logistics landscape. But has your technology footprint kept pace with your new challenges? Are you experiencing growing pains that could be alleviated by software upgrades, implementations, integrations, or customizations? Take a look around. Maybe it’s time to ensure all your distribution centers are using up-to-date warehouse management features and functionality. Doublecheck that all your carriers are connected to your transportation management solution in real time. If you’ve expanded your supply chain beyond the U.S., it might be time to add trade management software to navigate tariffs and other complexities. If you’ve outgrown your initial technology implementation, there could be friction among disconnected systems, processes, and teams, instead of the seamless flows modern software should enable. Redwood can help you rethink, scale, extend, and integrate your solutions for an easy win.

4. Is there often confusion or rework across your teams?

All your team members need to equally embrace supply chain digitalization to truly maximize your results. But that’s rarely the case. If your organization has a mix of enthusiastic early adopters and technology skeptics—which is typical—you’re probably experiencing frequent confusion and rework. Processes may not be clearly designed and supported, which leads to poor outcomes. At Redwood, we’ve seen this again and again. Customers are running the most advanced software, but their teams are not embracing all the features. Whether the answer is education, training, or cultural change, you need to get everyone on board. Your processes and outcomes won’t be aligned unless all your team members are also aligned.

5. Do you have real-time visibility across the supply chain?

If you’re like most logistics teams, supply chain disruption is your single greatest challenge. From extreme weather and blocked routes to tariffs and changing regulations, modern logistics software helps you sense and respond to these events. It provides the real-time visibility across the supply chain that keeps your operations running smoothly. But, in too many cases, that end-to-end view is blocked. Disconnected systems and processes create blind spots that allow disruptions to go unnoticed — until they’re negatively impacted your costs, service levels, or customer relationships. You need to ensure your technology solutions are connected with each other, as well as other systems within the business, via a common integration platform like RedwoodConnect™. In today’s volatile supply chain landscape, real-time connectivity and visibility are emerging as key differentiators. Don’t get left behind.

Assess and Improve Your Results with Redwood

These five questions are just a starting point for maximizing your results from your logistics software. As a 4PL with hundreds of customer success stories, Redwood offers a full range of technology support and expertise developed for organizations just like yours.

Why not begin with our Logistics Health Assessment, with a special focus on your use of advanced software? We can quickly look at your current use of technology, then suggest easy and practical improvements with minimal business disruption — and maximum payoff. It all begins by contacting Redwood today.