Without freight auditing technology, how can businesses possess complete control of their global transportation spend? Unfortunately, the answer is that it’s near impossible. The addition of a best-in-class, tech-enabled freight audit and payment (FAP) solution will pull all the freight data captured via your tech stack to digest, cleanse, and normalize it. This empowers your transportation leaders to make informed decisions with critical business intelligence.

With supply chain tech becoming an integral part of shippers’ day-to-day lives in our volatile transportation climate, it’s crucial to understand the evolving software.

Benefits of Freight Auditing Technology

From the Internet of Things (IoT) enhancing connectivity and providing real-time insights throughout the supply chain to capturing and analyzing big data from end-to-end, there are more technologically driven tools to optimize your global transportation operation than ever before. Let’s take a closer look at some of the major advantages of having freight auditing tools at your disposal.

Real-time Insights

Adding a fully connected supply chain greatly benefits any technology-enabled freight audit and payment solution. When paired with adopting digital technologies like IoT, these software solutions supply real-time insights into every aspect of your transportation management operation. They’ll also streamline communications and future-proof your operations with predictive analytics.

IoT and Connectivity

Enhanced connectivity across your expansive logistics operation empowers visibility, allows for more agility when issues arise and reduces manpower through automation. A connected supply chain relies on adopting digital technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), which will only enhance your freight audit data.

IoT sensors allow for real-time, end-to-end visibility and are helpful in:

• Aggregating carrier billing data via any transportation mode, providing new track and trace capabilities for shippers while allowing for a more robust freight audit
• Automating inventory replenishment and data about consumption trends
• Identifying trends in disruptions to eliminate bottlenecks or common issues, lowering freight costs
• Streamlining communications between shippers and carriers, ensuring a more agile supply chain with the ability to minimize disruptions and delays 

Big Data Analytics

Big data analytics refers to tools, systems, and technology that organizes and mines datasets for meaningful insights. With new capabilities unlocked by the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and artificial intelligence – even the largest unstructured data sets can be useful. For example, transportation leaders have all the information they need at their fingertips through automation and freight audit data integration.

Outsourcing Freight Auditing Technology

Many questions surround the benefits of a global enterprise outsourcing its audits to a freight audit and payment company. We’ve compiled frequently asked questions and provided answers so that you can make informed and intelligent decisions regarding your freight audit and payment process.

How Does Outsourced Freight Auditing Technology Work?

When you outsource your freight audit and payment operations to a third party, you trust a team of experts to work through burdensome, costly complications that accompany internal freight audits.

Issues that an outsourced FAP provider could address include the following:

• Dealing with multiple carriers with differentiating procedures, freight rates, costs, and details
• Tackling an insurmountable amount of FAP paperwork
• Devoting various, valuable internal resources to a task that will take a large chunk of their time
• Resolving mistakes, overcharges, and duplicate charges in a timely manner

What is an External Freight Bill Auditor?

An external freight bill auditor is a third-party company that inspects an enterprise’s carrier invoices for inaccuracies. As a result, they identify and minimize overpayments and inaccurate freight invoices, increasing cost-savings and improving freight spend data quality.

What Does a Third-Party Freight Audit Entail?

A traditional third-party freight audit process includes five steps: 

1. Centralizing freight invoice data
2. Categorizing and standardizing data
3. Verifying charges and items
4. Data analysis
5. Reporting

This thorough review allows transportation leaders to cut costs, optimize operations, improve data visibility, and ensure accurate, timely payments. In addition, enterprises gain a competitive advantage by completing regular freight invoice audits.

Is an Outsourced Freight Audit Secure?

It’s difficult to entrust a third-party organization with vast amounts of data, compliance requirements, and a complicated network of freight costs. To mitigate this risk, look for a solution that prioritizes transparency and data security. In addition, seek out companies that are well known and trusted in the industry, possibly ones that have worked with transportation situations similar to yours. Not sure where to start your research? I highly recommend looking at testimonials and case studies.

Does an Outsourced Freight Audit Generate Reliable Data?

In one word: yes. 

By onboarding a freight audit and provider solution that uses technology to audit every freight invoice from your transportation operation, your company gains end-to-end visibility into the data generated by your logistics operation. Compared to a cherry-picking freight audit approach, your all-encompassing data provides a holistic, reliable image of your operation.

What Do Outsourced Auditors Do with a Company’s Data?

A tech-enabled, outsourced freight audit and payment provider takes all your electronic freight invoices and ingests, cleanses, normalizes, and connects the data from your disparate systems. They will provide centralized business intelligence while catching errors in carrier invoices and decreasing shipping costs for your organization.

Your freight audit and payment partner should supply comprehensive data management, which delivers a clear view of the current state of your transportation operation and potential future data. With a flexible master data management framework, which is easily customizable to your global enterprise’s needs, you can establish global pricing rules that are visible to all and seamlessly incorporated into your FAP process.

Find an Outsourced Freight Auditing Technology Provider

The days of manual, in-house freight auditing are over. In today’s volatile market, supply chain technology, automation, and end-to-end visibility are necessities – not luxuries. Finding the right partner to trust with your data operations may seem daunting, but a little research will go a long way. 

Josh Bouk is the President at Trax Technologies, the global leader in Transportation Spend Management (TSM) solutions. Trax elevates traditional Freight Audit and Payment (FAP) with a combination of industry-leading cloud-based technology solutions and expert services to help enterprises with the world’s more complex supply chains better manage and control their global transportation costs and drive enterprise-wide efficiency and value. For more information, visit www.traxtech.com.