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Reduce shipping and delivery expenses by outsourcing

In the face of rising fuel and employment costs, combined with slow or inconsistent sales, many more businesses these days are considering outsourcing all (or part) of their shipping/delivery department functions to outside delivery companies.

If your company uses in-house, employee drivers and company owned vehicles for local customer pickup and delivery, your are aware of the extensive costs involved with purchasing, operating, maintaining, and insuring a fleet of vans or cars; not to mention soaring fuel prices and the ever-increasing employment taxes and benefits that can mask your true cost. Additional unnecessary expenses result from employee idle time, during periods in which workload is inconsistent and resources cannot be fully utilized.

Outsourcing delivery operations saves your company money by replacing fixed expenses with a variable expense. (That employed driver is still costing as much when not really needed). Lets face it; volume of work is usually not the same all the time. If it was, it would be easy...You always have exactly enough work for 3 drivers so you hire 3 drivers, buy 3 vehicles and forget about it. In reality though, sometimes you need 6 drivers and other times only 1 or 2 will do. In this example, you must hire 6 drivers and buy 6 vehicles in order to always give your customers the best possible service. Why not simply pay for the deliveries you need and let someone else worry about this problem? If your volume slows down, your expenses decrease right along with it.

What you may not be aware of is that a good outside delivery company can not only reduce your costs, but actually improve service to your customers at the same time. Using the above example, you may decide to cut three of your six drivers in order to maximize productivity on the remaining three. Yes, they will be busy all the time now that they are handling double workload. But what happens when they are all out at remote deliveries and one of your best customers needs something right now? Will you make them wait? Perhaps send out a manager (at much higher cost, not to mention loss of manager functions during that time).

At Green Delivery Service, deliveries are all we do. When you need three drivers, we will have three available, when you need only one driver we will have one, and best of all, when none are needed your cost is $0. How can we do that? Remember that your requirements are only a fraction of our entire resource requirement, as we are servicing hundreds of other local businesses as well. Therefore, a large shift in your individual shipping workload is only a small change in ours, and is often cancelled out by other customers' requirements shifting in the opposite direction. You are essentially leveraging the aggregated resource requirements of our entire customer base in order to take (and pay for) only what you need, when you need it.

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