Appointment scheduling in logistics has long been a manual process, prone to error and miscommunication. Thanks to automation, that's changing, says Tom Curee, president of Qued.

Appointment scheduling can be a complex process involving multiple parties, including carriers and third-party logistics providers. Until recently, it was largely a manual effort, involving the participation of humans in real time.

“We put a Band-aid on this problem,” Curee says. When it takes an average of seven to 15 minutes to arrange a single appointment, the cumulative effort can be burdensome and time-consuming. More than 100 million man-hours are associated with scheduling in the logistics industry, he notes.

Digitization through automating key processes can help make that process significantly more efficient. Transportation and logistics providers are keen on using technology such as application programming interfaces to streamline operations and do a better job of allocating labor when orders arrive for processing.

There are multiple approaches to appointment scheduling that can yield the same kind of savings in time and resources, Curee says. “A lot of people have the opinion that it’s APIs or nothing. I don’t necessarily subscribe to that. There are a lot of ways we can go about bringing this together.”

Dwell time — delays in transferring product between warehouses and trucks — remains a challenge. Many companies don’t have visibility to shift changes within the warehouse, and can encounter unanticipated delays because of that ignorance. Modern systems are providing a new layer of shipment visibility that alerts facilities about driver delays as well, so that labor can be properly allocated and made more flexible in line with actual conditions in the warehouse. “You can cut some of the waste out of the supply chain,” Curee says.