Shipium Blog

Going From "What-If" to What's Next with Shipium Simulation

Written by Anurag Allena | September 11, 2025

Every shipper wants to make smarter decisions, reduce risks, and improve their bottom line. But how can you be sure a major change to your shipping operations will pay off without risking a costly mistake? 

Today, it’s critical to ask and answer "what-if" questions, like:

  • What would happen if we used more ground services?
  • How would adding a new carrier impact costs and delivery times?
  • Can we optimize our volume to hit better discount tiers?

Traditionally, getting answers to these questions takes weeks, if not months, of complex data analysis and manual effort. But what if you could get those insights in hours?

The Power of Shipium Simulation

Shipium's Simulation tool empowers you to test your hypotheses in a controlled, virtualized environment. By modeling different scenarios, you can understand the potential impact of operational changes before you make them — and do so in hours, not weeks or months.

Sharpen Your Strategy

Effective long-term planning requires more than assumptions; it demands concrete data. Our platform allows you to quickly and iteratively test new ideas, creating a feedback loop that informs and refines your shipping strategy.

Validate Your Initiatives

When you need to make the case for a necessary process change, the results from a simulation provide the hard evidence you need. You can build a compelling business case by demonstrating how a proposed change will meet your specific goals for cost reduction, performance improvement, or both.

From “What-If” to What’s Next: How It Works

Shipium simplifies the process of testing new scenarios, both by providing an intuitive tool and expert guidance to set you up for success.

Quick Setup, Rapid Results

To get started, provide your historical shipping data, and work with us to configure your network parameters, including carriers, rates, and volume thresholds. You can then apply specific constraints to your scenarios and quickly run simulations to get the answers you need.

You can model changes such as:

  • Introducing new carriers or adjusting rates
  • Testing different delivery date requirements
  • Modifying business rule configurations
  • Adjusting volume caps for service tiers

For common scenarios, we even have pre-built templates to accelerate the process.

Intuitive Analysis

Once a simulation is complete, results are analyzed using an intuitive set of reports and data visualizations. You'll gain a clear understanding of impact to key metrics across carrier performance, origin-specific performance, and any other criteria you’re looking to evaluate. This makes it easy to compare and contrast different scenarios and identify the best path forward.

Expert Partnership

Shipium’s team can act as a true partner throughout the process. With deep experience from running a high volume of simulations for enterprise-grade shippers, they can provide hands-on support and guidance to ensure your simulations deliver the insights you're looking for.

Real Data Science, Not Hype

Our approach to simulation is built on a foundation of advanced data science, which is at the core of Shipium’s product strategy. Our data science program leverages best practices and the latest proven techniques to ensure our predictions are reliable and accurate.

Data-Driven Intelligence

The accuracy of any prediction is directly tied to the quality of its data. Shipium combines your unique historical data with our vast platform-wide data, which is collected and anonymized from millions of executed shipments. We also incorporate real-world factors like weather, carrier updates, and service disruptions to ensure our models reflect the complexities of your network.

Customized for Your Network

Our predictive models are trained specifically on your network's properties, including your carriers, rates, origins, and business rules. This ensures that simulations provide a true reflection of your unique operational environment.

An Unmatched Team

Our data science leaders and engineers come from leading organizations and bring a wealth of experience in solving complex business problems. They are continuously developing new models and applications to expand the capabilities of our platform, and the types of optimization we can support.

Common Use Cases

Here are some scenarios that companies using Shipium Simulation are running to make informed strategic decisions.

Intelligent Service Downgrades

Identify opportunities to use less expensive service methods that would still meet or exceed your delivery speed goals. By simulating non-guaranteed services like ground shipping, you can find the ideal balance between speed and cost, helping you meet delivery promises in the most sustainable way.

Optimal Volume Balancing

Strategically allocate volume to balance carrier commitments with pure rate shopping. You can determine which shipments should go to a specific carrier to meet a contractual obligation at the lowest cost, while also identifying opportunities to shift volume for additional savings.

GRI Cost Analysis

Understand the impact of upcoming General Rate Increases (GRIs) on your costs by lane. This gives you a powerful tool for contract negotiations and allows you to plan for potential shifts in volume or origin selection based on new rate structures.

Competitive Delivery Promises

Model the impact of offering faster delivery promises to your customers. This helps you understand the cost implications of various delivery speeds, allowing you to stay competitive or even outperform your rivals when cost targets are met.

Flexible Shipping Options (3PLs)

3PLs use our Simulation tool to test and create custom, branded shipping options for clients. By simulating different delivery timeframes, you can select the most cost-effective carrier and service to meet a specific service level agreement (SLA) that you’ve presented to customers, ensuring you meet expectations while optimizing for costs.

Wrapping Up

Data-driven decision making is paramount. Shipium's Simulation product offers a proven approach to optimizing fulfillment operations, reducing risks, and achieving business goals. By transforming complex "what-if" questions into clear insights, you can move forward with confidence and unlock significant cost savings and performance improvements.

If you’re looking to modernize your approach to strategic planning and scenario analysis, reach out to our team here to see if Shipium can help.