Most businesses with more than one despatch point did not plan their freight that way. The first warehouse set up an account with a carrier. The second site opened a year later and the new despatch lead brought the carrier they knew from their last job. A branch in a regional town found a local operator who picks up on time. Each decision was sensible when it was made. Together they leave an operations lead who cannot answer a simple question: what did we send last month, with whom, and how did it go?
This guide is for that operations lead. It covers what drifts when every site runs its own freight, the three things worth standardising, and the things that should stay local.
How Multi-Site Freight Drifts
Drift starts with accounts. Each site that opens its own carrier account also opens its own credit application, its own invoice, its own support contact and its own login. Nobody decides to have eleven carrier relationships across four sites. It accumulates one reasonable choice at a time.
Booking habits follow the accounts. One site books through a carrier's own portal, another emails a booking request, a third uses a spreadsheet template a former staff member built. The consignment record ends up wherever that site booked it, so tracking a delivery means knowing which site sent it and which system that site uses.
Then the service promise splits. Customers who order from two of your sites can get two different experiences of the same business: different carriers, different tracking emails, different delivery windows. They do not know or care which dock their order left from.
What Drift Costs You
The first cost is visibility. With the records spread across portals and inboxes, nobody can see freight across the business, so nobody can compare how the same kind of consignment is handled from each site.
The second is comparison. A site that always books the same carrier never finds out whether a different carrier would have served that lane better, because nobody at that site is looking at the alternatives.
The third is support. When a delivery goes wrong, the person dealing with it first has to work out which account it was booked on, then who to call at that carrier. Every site holds a different piece of that knowledge, and it walks out the door when people leave.
The Three Things to Standardise
Who holds the carrier accounts. Either each site holds its own, or one party holds them for the whole business. On a managed freight platform (4PL), the platform holds them. Senditt manages the carrier accounts, billing and support, and every site books on Senditt's negotiated rates across 35+ carriers. The sites stop needing their own carrier relationships to get freight out the door.
How a booking is made. One booking form for every site means every consignment carries the same information in the same fields. On Senditt that is the Create Consignment form: a despatch date and time, then separate pickup and delivery panels with location name, contact, phone, email, address and suburb. The pickup panel is where the site's own details go, so the form serves every dock without changes.
Where the record lives. If every site books in the same place, every consignment lands in the same list. Senditt's consignment list carries each consignment's service, despatch date, ETA and status, across carriers, and it can be filtered by company and carrier. Head office sees the whole business in one place.
Worked Example: A Three-Site Distributor
Take a hypothetical distributor of cleaning supplies with a main warehouse in western Sydney, a smaller warehouse in Brisbane and a trade counter in Newcastle that sends a handful of consignments a day.
Before consolidating, the Sydney warehouse books two carriers through their portals, Brisbane books one carrier by email, and the Newcastle counter calls a local courier. Month-end means three sets of invoices and a spreadsheet to join them. When a Newcastle customer calls about a late order, the counter staff check the courier's text messages.
After moving to one managed platform, all three sites book through the same form. Sydney still books its two familiar carriers, because they are on the platform. Brisbane sees the same carrier choices Sydney sees for the same kind of consignment. Newcastle books its small daily run through the same form as everyone else, so its consignments show up in the same list. The operations lead opens the list on a Monday morning and sees last week's freight for the whole business in one screen. When the Newcastle customer calls, the counter staff look up the consignment number in the same list the warehouses use.
Nothing about the example needed the sites to change how they pack or when their trucks arrive. It changed where the booking happens and who holds the accounts.
What Stays Local
Consolidation does not mean every site works identically. Some things should stay with the people on the dock.
Pickup windows depend on each site's trading hours and dock space. The despatch date and time on the booking form lets each site book to its own schedule.
Site contacts belong on the pickup panel. The carrier's driver needs the person at that dock, not someone at head office.
Some lanes suit a particular carrier because of where the site is. A regional branch may have one carrier that serves its area well. On a platform with 35+ carriers, that carrier is often already there, and the branch keeps using it while its consignments join everyone else's in the list.
Questions to Ask Before You Consolidate
- How many carrier accounts do our sites hold between them, and who at each site manages them?
- Where does each site's consignment record live today, and could head office look one up without asking that site?
- Which carriers does each site rely on, and are they on the platform we are considering?
- Who does a site call when a delivery goes wrong, and will that change?
- Do any sites need an integration with our eCommerce, ERP or WMS platform, and how long will that take? (On Senditt, integrations with your eCommerce, ERP or WMS take two to four weeks, depending on the platform. Each site can book the same day in the meantime.)
If you run freight from more than one site and nobody can see all of it in one place, book a freight review and we will show you one consignment list across every site. There is no lock-in on standard accounts. Fixed terms apply only where you agree to one. You can read more about how quoting, booking, tracking and manifests work together on the platform page.
Senditt is a managed freight platform (4PL). Senditt is not Sendle and is not affiliated with it.