Insights & News

Want to Save Money on Your Shipment? Try Playing a Game of Real Life Tetris

4 Boxes stacked like real life Tetris

Posted On March 30, 2018

Remember Tetris? That late ’80s and early ’90s Russian-made game where you stacked various-shaped bricks, trying to make complete lines before your screen filled up and flashed “Game Over”?

We do.

We remember spending hours on our Nintendos, building line after line, advancing to the next level. There was something truly addictive about that game. Fitting those pieces together was rewarding in a way that success in other video games just wasn’t.

Of course, times have changed—and Call of Duty is awesome.

But still, it’s no Tetris.

Tetris might be gone, but if you’re in the business of shipping goods and products around the world, you know there is a lot more than just an intrinsic reward to stacking items in an optimal way. Costs are increasing, and capacity is tightening across all modes of transportation. With companies being charged for the space they are occupying in a container or on a pallet, one of the best methods of reducing costs is to optimize the way a shipment is arranged.

You could call it cube optimization.

Or, you could call it a giant game of Tetris.

This time, though, there is more than just your personal pride or the high score at the arcade on the line.

If you are playing Tetris with a shipment, there is real money at stake—especially if you are moving goods across the world or across the country on a regular basis. Those savings can mean the difference between your company staying competitive in an increasingly tough market or losing its edge.

A strong global economy, an ongoing shortage of truckers, and several other factors mean that right now carriers have the advantage. The domestic and international capacity to transport goods hasn’t caught up with the domestic and international capacity to produce goods. The result is manufacturers and distributors are being squeezed more and more by carriers with a limited amount of space and limited rate flexibility. In other words, when there is this much demand and such limited supply, carriers have very little incentive to lower rates.

That also means that as manufacturers and distributors, our clients have a lot of incentive to become very good at cube optimization.

Fortunately, you don’t have to figure out how to win this round of Tetris on your own. Flat World Supply Chain can help you identify necessary improvements and help you control cost increases using our Pipeline™ Transportation Management System (TMS). Cube optimization isn’t the only benefit our TMS delivers. Pipeline™ also provides our customers a suite of web-native modules, including a multi-carrier rating engine, mode/shipment optimization, shipping execution, and transparent visibility tools while also providing robust database functionality with a point-and-click user interface.

By partnering with us, you’ll improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and visibility of your shipments from the moment they are packed onto a pallet or in a container right up until the moment they arrive at their intended destination. That is our commitment to you, and it’s a commitment built on our belief in excellence.

And at our company, excellence means consistently trying to be the best at everything we do.

Including real-life Tetris.