Digital freight forwarder Zencargo today, 28th September, announced the launch of its Procurement service for Retail feature to enable Retail Businesses to take complete control of their end-to-end Supply Chain.

The feature uses Virtual Local Offices to provide procurement teams with a local presence, close to their suppliers, enabling businesses to get the level of detail that would normally require a remote team. These offices combine automated messaging and AI to communicate with suppliers, chasing for regular production updates and providing complete transparency on the end-to-end process. The system flags issues at an SKU-level so teams can review problems before they arise and focus efforts on minimising disturbances.

This is the latest development in Zencargo’s mission to help businesses digitise their supply chains. The tool enables UK businesses to immediately automate 67 million hours of manual admin, which is the equivalent to over 30,000 employees being tied up managing suppliers and chasing for visibility. This aims to solve part of the UK’s productivity gap with current systems suffering from a lack of automation for simple admin tasks costing UK Supply chains £1.5bn per year.

Currently supply chain teams manage their suppliers through emails, phone calls and shared spreadsheets. This causes them to waste time on manual admin, translating information from emails and across unconnected systems – which also introduces human error into processes.

Richard Fattal, Chief Commercial Officer:  “Tracking a purchase can be highly frustrating, especially for our clients who work with dozens suppliers across large volumes of shipments every month. Current communication systems mean that businesses have to manage large procurement teams to get a minimum level of visibility into their supply chain. Tools like ours will help teams to get instant visibility, so that they can manage by exception and focus their actions on improving their supply chain. ”

Zencargo have already attracted hundreds of businesses to its platform from FTSE listed companies to high-growth Scale Ups. For users of the Zencargo dashboard, the service is provided at no extra charge, enabling large supply chains to digitise their end-to-end operations overnight, without lengthy implementation costs, and to benefit from a complete view of production down to SKU level detail.