Shipping manifest is one of the most vital documents that needs to be produced accurately because all your goods transportation depends on it. It’s a kind of passport for your export goods verifying the legality of the transported items.
Shipping manifest is mandatory for any business involved in international trade. It’s a detailed document containing all information about the shipment in process.
ERP solutions provide the best transportation planning applications to plan and execute inbound shipments from suppliers, outbound cargos to customers and even intra-company transportation in the most efficient and cost-effective way. This enables the organizations to reduce shipment planning cycle time, control the transportation costs and drive continuous improvement in customer service levels.
Here, shipping manifest acts as a key shipment document. You should always prepare and produce it quickly and accurately, especially if you are dealing in international commerce and trading. This document not only contains all important information about delivery items, but also using an ERP system you can generate and maintain invoices for the shipments you make. You can also use the manifest to know the delivery method and track shipments as a carrier.
Make your own shipping manifest for goods delivery.
Since it’s an extremely detailed document because of the involvement of multiple shipping and transportation parties. This makes shipping both expensive and risky. However, with automation, you can streamline and speed up the entire shipping and manifest process. Starting from the product owners or manufacturers who need to move the finished goods, followed by the transportation companies or cargo carriers, shipping insurers, and extended to custom services of the countries involved; both origin and destination states. All these stakeholders have their own interests in goods delivery without trouble.
Why do you need an ERP system to create and manage shipping manifests?
The main cause is data errors. Yes, when you manually create this document or any other document that involves a lot of information and you need to produce it frequently, wrong data entries become obvious.
With all the necessary information, automated manifest is the best practice with zero mistakes – quickly and seamlessly produced using an enterprise resource planning software.
What should be included in your shipping manifest?
Typically, a billing list with all details about the shipping items is created and presented to the concerned ground or air carrier. A shipping manifest also enlists additional requests such as changes in the supplementary services; insurance, weight, zones, distance, COD amount, dimension, number of boxes. Declared value. Moreover, it contains all important information to help you file a shipping claim for lost, damaged or stolen items if necessary.
Some other basic information includes;
- List of merchandize to be shipped
- Total number of items and boxes
- Types of packages being shipped
- Sender and recipient’s details
- Means of transportation
- Transportation management software
- Shipping route
- Origin and destination address
As an international goods transports document, shipping manifest also helps identify the goods to be delivered to multiple consignees.
Transnational couriers need it for each shipment. If you are the one, then you can produce manifests with accurate merchandise data using an ERP software. Well, it will greatly help you if you not only manufacture and distribute the products, but also carry out international trade. This means you are working as a courier company as well, but for your finished goods only. For shipping companies, they may not need an all-inclusive enterprise resource planning solution.
Manufacturing software systems may support easy integration to your partner carrier manifesting systems or third-party warehouses. However, if as a discrete manufacturer you don’t need any third-party’s support of any kind and manage everything from work/sales orders to material procurement, shop floor and shipping and logistics, then make sure your selected ERP solution supports all these operations. You can easily create a legally signed shipping manifest document as a proof about the merchandise to be shipped.
What’s more?
You can generate shipment invoices against manifests because it contains all details about the senders and the recipients. Similarly, using an invoice you can create a shipping manifest. This dual functionality along with other logistics and shipment management modules in an ERP will help you streamline your shipping and manifesting processes.
Moving ahead, you can also take advantage of using delivery details to assign carrier tracking numbers. Print barcode shipping labels, and produce the end-of-day carrier manifest. With this, you can easily process the deliveries for all those carriers having shipping manifest requirements. The warehouse integration in your opted ERP software for manufacturing helps support the shipment request received and the shipment confirmation sent back to the concerned personnel or carrier company for seamless processing of shipping manifest.
Don’t get confused between shipping documents.
Shipment manifest differs from all other shipping documents such as delivery notes, bill of lading, packing and picking lists, etc. Shipping manifest is for the shipper while others are usually related to buyers and warehouse managers.
Seamless preparation of shipping manifest:
Just like all your other business operations and data processing and management chores, your shipping manifests should be prepared quickly and managed without trouble. One inaccurate data entry and you will have to face grave consequences – losing your clients and huge profit margins. It will put your market reputation on stack.
So, always generate accurate manifests using an ERP solution where all information about the list of goods to be shipped, their weight and quantity, costs, address, etc., automatically comes from the concerned departments – a centralized database is the backbone here. Shipping manifest templates will help you a lot in this regard.
Wrap Up:
It’s essential to create a shipping manifest because it verifies your transported merchandise wherever it’s shipped including all routes and destinations involved. With MIE Trak Pro you can leverage the making and optimization of shipping manifests to decrease transportation costs, all while increasing on-time deliveries. Automate the entire shipping and manifesting process using this ERP solution’s invoice module.
No need to have a separate shipping manifest solution, when this completely integrated ERP software is built with the same tool-set and designed for manufacturers and distributors.
