When shipping anything internationally, you need to take lots of precautions to make sure it arrives at where it’s headed safely. However, when we’re talking about high-value cargo, things get even more complex. The more expensive the content of your shipment is, the more risks you’ll have to face along the way. We want to help you with it, so today, we’ll share with you some of our knowledge on shipping strategies for high-value cargo.
Here, we’re talking about items such as:
• Art
• Jewelry
• Electronics
• Luxury clothing
• Medicaments
• Alcohol
• High-end food
No matter what tactics you decide to go with, the goal stays the same — to protect the shipment as well as possible. Hence, you want to make sure that it doesn’t get stolen, damaged, or lost.
Imagine that you’re sending something from Chennai to Dubai. Instead of searching for the fastest and cheapest way to do it, you should look for the safest. You need to think through your route and come up with a plan that ensures security at each stage of the process.
Let’s dive into the problems and see how you can battle them.
Cargo theft
Most reputable logistic companies don’t have problems with making sure that their high-value shipments don’t get lost or damaged. They have plenty of experience, so they’ll take all the needed precautions. However, theft is one risk that it seems is harder and harder to protect from each day.
If you have to send out something in a rush, you might have to choose to work with a company that you never cooperated with before. Of course, if you don’t have a long-lasting relationship with them, you can’t know for sure how reputable and trustworthy they are. And this opens doors for advanced theft.
Thieves are professionals
Don’t get us wrong, people who do this aren’t amateurs by no means. They know a lot about the process and how the transport of luxury items works and looks. They’ll find a way to get the right credentials or trick people into believing that they did.
And if they don’t go for the fraud plan, they’ll go for hijacking. More and more countries around the world are reporting on various criminal patterns. Thus, you have to go out of your way to develop a strategy that will allow you to keep your shipment safe, but that doesn’t make your surcharges too high.
You do this through careful planning, thinking about problem areas, and getting rid of the risks. Moreover, new trends in the industry can help you with it. Figure out where your shipment is the most vulnerable, and use these new technologies to make it more secure there.
Speed
One of the best shipping strategies for high-value cargo is to make your transport quick. The more you can expedite your process, the fewer opportunities bad guys will have to create problems for you.
Picking the right timing is what you should focus on here. By doing it right, you’ll ensure that your shipment gets to its destination sooner and that it arrives safely. Weekends and holidays are ideal for this purpose. On top of that, take as much time as you can to plan the route. If you’re using multimodal transportation, try to stay in contact with the people piloting the ship and driving the trucks afterward. Ask them to report any detours they must take, so you know what’s going on at any given moment.
Of course, expedited shipping isn’t an easy thing to perform. You’ll have to do lots of careful planning and research to make sure that your supply chain is as secure as it can be. In the ideal scenario, you’ll prepare your shipment so it can’t be damaged, monitor the security measures, and track the cargo as it makes its way from one country to another.
Building trust
When you’re working with a partner company that you know pretty much nothing about, you increase the chances of something going wrong. And it doesn’t have to be on purpose. The company you choose might not have enough experience, so they make an honest mistake. Still, you’ll end up without your precious cargo, and that’s a problem.
To stay on top of it, you want to create lasting business relationships. The more informed and involved in every part of the shipping process you can be, the better it is for you. Go down this path, and you’ll ensure that the cargo arrives at its destination in one piece, every time.
Now, to get to this point, you’ll have to put in quite a bit of work. Building mutual trust requires a lot of time and effort. You’ll have to visit their facilities regularly and educate their employees about the security threats and how to spot them. Moreover, you have to teach them about the language, infrastructure, and the practices in the countries they didn’t do any work in before. It’s a long process, but stick with it, and you’ll reap all the rewards.
Security measures
Finally, we get to the security measures. And to make things go your way, you need to introduce several of these. If you’re organizing everything by yourself, know that the time your shipment spends on the road brings a lot more risks than when it’s on the sea. Hence, you want to do all in your power to protect the cargo in trucks.
The first step is choosing your carriers carefully. If you know you can trust them — you can focus on selecting the dedicated trucks and using box trailers. Give them fixed parking instructions, and make sure that they stick to them. You can do this by including GPS trackers in your shipment.
To take it a step further, opt for survey and inspection services if your logistic company offers them. You’ll have a person dedicated to making sure everything goes as planned, and that brings peace of mind that you couldn’t get otherwise.
And the last of the shipping strategies for high-value cargo is to make it look like there’s nothing worth stealing. Make the documentation as generic as possible, and limit the access to sensitive information within the shipping company. That’s how you keep it safe.