Peak Season Confidence with Shipium Injection Shipping

Many conversations this time of year circulate around peak season preparedness, deadlines, inventory availability, data analyses and ensuring businesses are on path to close out Q4 with the best bottom line. All of this planning leans into kickstarting the New Year with a strong and sophisticated business and fulfillment plan. Yet not all businesses get there as anticipated, and this year as conversations loom around inflation and recession there is a larger demand for ensuring costs are managed and the best solutions are easily and correctly utilized for anticipated business flow operations and satisfied customers. 

Shipiums’s Injection Shipping solution manages the use of an additional mode of transportation, typically long-haul trucks, to pick up shipments from a fulfillment center (FC) and transport them to an alternative injection point for delivery by the carrier. Most businesses will utilize injection shipping, also called zone skipping, to achieve lower costs, manage last minute shipments, use regional carriers for origin/destination locations not covered, increase deliveries and customer satisfaction by meeting delivery deadlines. 

Using or trying to implement injection shipping usually partners with complexity and old school processes using email, phone or Excel to plan shipments, and loss of data that is critical for various types of analyses. We strategically gathered insights on how to mainstream and simplify injection shipping and have designed one of our most intricate solutions to-date, a solution that is extremely easy to use and is accessible via a few steps in our Shipium Console. It helps our customers achieve business success and awareness of the ecommerce demands that quickly ebb and flow.

Within the solution design, the customer can select injection points based on preferred carriers and zip-zones, contractual obligations and limits - new or existing - and desired label augmentations. Each injection site maintains its own rate table, allowing our Injection Shipping solution to work simultaneously with our powerful rate shopping solution that continuously calculates the best carrier rate with the preferred dedicated time in transit. Keep in mind that setting up your information can easily be done by yourself, and does not require IT support or an external software extension. The Shipium Console is a modern web interface that is user-friendly and integrates all operating Shipium solutions - Delivery Promise, Carrier Selection, Carrier Integration, Fulfillment Engine, Simulation - on one platform similar to a unified solution hub with each solution ‘speaking’ to the other providing stellar shipment coordination and control. It also serves as a starting point for capturing Carrier Rulesets and Carrier Limits for your carrier accounts to integrate seamlessly into our Carrier Selection and Carrier Integration solutions providing a beginning point to assimilate flawlessly with our library of features. 

Easily setting up Injection Shipping in our Console entails the following prompted steps:

1. Access your Fulfillment Profiles 
2. Add Injection Site 
   • Select Carrier - current or can add new contract, detailed settings
   • Add Injection Site name
3. Add Time in Transit days
4. Add Rate Modifier (optional) - percentage or fixed rate
5. Add Rate Modifier Type (optional) - percentage or fixed rate
6. Add Injection Site Contact - select name or create name
7. Add Limit Destinations (optional) - injection site destination postal codes 
8. Test Configuration Setting
9. Add Label Augmentations

You’re all set and to also now utilize our Carrier Rate Selection solution that calculates your injection option against other direct shipment methods to provide you the most competitive carrier rate within your desired delivery date. 

Note all information captured, which is typically overlooked in legacy-type solutions, is used and stored to provide useful data analyses. Part of Shipium’s solution design is to capture information that applies to other solutions. The information gathered for Injection Shipping automatically provides the customer details for our ShipOption, Fulfillment Context, Carrier Rules and Desired Delivery Dates features. 

A popular use case for Injection Shipping is for subscription-based businesses because of the predictable shipment volumes. One of our customers, a food delivery company, has implemented Injection Shipping with the critical goal to deliver perishable goods on-time. The customer schedules nightly freight transfers from their warehouse to inject into last-mile carrier hubs in key regions of the country, like the Northeast, Southeast, and California. The predictable volume allows them to negotiate competitive freight rates that, when combined with Zone 1-2 rates of last-mile carriers in each region, proves more cost effective than shipping parcel deliveries directly to all customers from their warehouse. Another use case is a smaller retailer or 3PL who has only one warehouse located on either coast. This scenario has traditionally been a great fit for zone skipping, as deliveries to customers on the opposite side of the country will always be a Zone 5-8 shipment, and costs will add up quickly. Over half of all Shipium customers who have a single fulfillment origin utilize zone skipping in some fashion, and lean on our Injection Shipping solution to make it happen.

A single fulfillment origin not only frequently causes long-haul shipments to Zones 5-8, but also limits access to regional or specialty carriers that a shipper might want to use because regional carriers are often limited by where they can pick up orders. For example, CDL is a consistent favorite regional shipper in the Northeast by our customers, but does not pick up orders outside of their region. For customers with a warehouse in Nevada, CDL is not an option. With our Injection Shipping solution, however, CDL’s competitive delivery in New York City is now an option as customers can schedule a freight shipment to inject into a CDL hub in the Northeast. 

Also, many customers are too familiar with national carriers capping their shipments based on specific pickup times that unfortunately leaves a surplus of shipments at the origin that are not deliverable. Our Injection Shipping solution allows the customer to contract with regional LTL carriers to manage the surplus of shipments, and in the case of using LTL carriers, the customer can also increase their number of shipments. 

Utilizing Injection Shipping partnered with our carrier rate shopping allows for peace of mind, speed and accuracy, and most important, lower shipping costs by injecting a package closer to its final destination; increased delivery speed by injecting a shipment closer to its final destination; and increased carrier capacity by adding an alternative node in the supply chain delivery process to deliver more packages. Our customers are then able to focus on other needs and projects while their shipments are flowing and increasing with demand. Both our customers and their customers are satisfied and looking forward to their next shipments. 

You can learn more about Injection Shipping and our other integrating solutions by speaking directly with our sales team to learn the benefits and ease of implementation to start now.