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Featured Solution: Compliance Reporting
In order to control costs, transportation departments are putting forth more effort in analyzing their shipping patterns to determine the most cost effective shipping methods. Contracts are often specifically negotiated with carriers to account for those patterns. However, the best negotiated contracts are of no value if the service levels that were envisioned during contract negotiation are not applied toward the actual shipments.
enVista has worked with its customers to create custom compliance reporting that verifies whether internal and external shippers are utilizing the approved service levels and carriers. enVista built a powerful compliance tool that handles complex rules to verify that shipments fall within the predefined guidelines. The rules include any of the values passed by the carriers in the electronic invoice files to validate the shipments. Most commonly, the rules look at the shipper’s state, the sender company name and the package dimensions to determine the expected service level and highlight those shipments that do not pass the criteria. While most rules have been defined to validate the service level, other rules can be defined to highlight improper use of Saturday shipping or identify situations where cheaper solutions such as LTL or hundred weight could have been implemented. Shipping managers can use the reports enVista provides to identify those locations and third party shippers that are not providing optimum service levels and take corrective action that can save the company thousands of dollars. One enVista client, a world recognized retailer, had us develop a set of rules that would ensure their stores and vendors were in compliance with the guidelines they set forth. This retailer negotiated separate accessorial and rate discounts with UPS and FedEx, which allowed them to maximize their savings by dividing their discount objectives between the two carriers. This strategy enabled them to make concessions to a carrier while still achieving the targeted discount with the other carrier. One carrier contract may have been optimized for vendors in southern states, while the other carrier contract may have been optimized for their DCs shipping large dimension packages to stores.
In order to be successful with this approach, the retailer needed to ensure its shippers were using the correct carrier for the appropriate situation. This became possible using the compliance tools enVista created to proactively find incorrect shipping patterns so that errors could be corrected and savings maximized.
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