Savings In the Ba
A s much of society and the business world past few years, it’s clear that many are planning for a new normal. Supply chain professionals are using their experience to inform future decisions and build stronger, more resilient organizations and processes. “We continue to see shippers examining the vulnerabilities in their supply chains. To manage those vulnerabilities, shippers are craving visibility and automation,” says Kristy Brown, vice president, freight payment operations with CTSI-Global, a provider of freight audit solutions and logistics information technology. That extends to freight invoice processing and auditing. emerge from the pandemic and the disruptions that have upended supply chains over the
says Craig Cameron, vice president of sales and marketing with A3 Freight Payment, which offers freight payment, spend analytics, and business intelligence tools. Companies are asking freight audit rms to help them quantify the drivers behind the changing costs. Is it related only to freight? Is it freight plus accessorials? Is it new accessorials? And because costs have jumped so dramatically, “shippers are far more inclined to get back their pound of esh,” says Tom Nightingale, chief executive of cer with AFS Logistics, a 40-year provider of freight audit and payment, as well as LTL, parcel, and transportation management services. Nightingale points to the rate to move a container from China to the United States. Two years ago, it stood at about $800. It’s now up to about $25,000. “Shippers don’t want to pay a penny more than they have to,” he says. I EN CLT The challenge is not just that transportation rates are rising, but also that they’re increasing in ways that can be dif cult to decipher, says Nick Fisher, director of sales with ARTC Logistics, formerly AR Traf c Consultants. The range of additional fees and accessorials continues to
“The freight bill sits as the culmination of every other piece of transportation information,” says Hannah Testani, chief executive of cer with Intelligent Audit, which provides automated freight audit and recovery, among other services. “The bill provides the complete story of a shipment.” Along with cost information, shippers increasingly are searching for insight
from their data. “Companies come to us to take their complex transportation data and make sense of it,” Testani says. The transportation costs shippers knew and understood prior to the pandemic have completely changed. “A lot of companies now are doing more brokerage or spot quotes, and they’re struggling, in some cases, to implement audit processes for those changes,”
Along with transportation cost information, shippers increasingly are searching for insight from their data. And with freight bills growing more cumbersome and complicated, shippers are seeking advanced analytics about their costs.
72 Inbound Logistics • September 2022
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