Fortigo
Automated Closed-Loop Freight Auditing

Enterprises often leverage the expertise of freight carriers to meet their delivery obligations to clients, as per contractual terms. However, transcontinental shipments require carriers to generate multiple invoices for ordering, shipment, or even destination charges. Historically, enterprises have had limited visibility into the redundancies across the multitude of invoices, which oftentimes results in overpayment to carriers. Furthermore, despite being billed correctly, enterprises find it challenging to identify the exact departments accountable for certain charges. Heralding a new era in freight auditing through automation is Fortigo—a logistics technology solution provider that has carved a niche for itself in freight auditing. “We support closed loop auditing to identify charges that have no payers, despite being billed correctly, to provide rapid return on investment by optimizing and deploying closed-loop logistics processes,” states George Kontoravdis, President, Fortigo. The company’s state-of-the-art application, which when plugged into the supply chain functions as an “auto-pilot” for freight auditing, minimizes ship-to-order times and streamlines collaboration between enterprises and carriers.

The Fortigo Freight Audit application validates each invoice to identify redundancies based on metrics like service agreements, discounts, and delivery commitments. Firstly, the application validates whether an invoice is generated by a carrier that the company is associated with; subsequently, the invoice data elements are compared with documents such as purchase orders to ensure the absence of previously billed particulars in an invoice. “We tie all the charges to a specific shipment to check for charges previously paid by the company,” states Kontoravdis. The application scrutinizes contracts and invoices to identify and course-correct gray areas pertaining to billing, which Kontoravdis describes as “inflection points”; delivery commitments and services as mandated by the contracts are also examined and implemented.

We tie all the charges to a specific shipment to check for charges previously paid by the company

Furthermore, the application automatically performs general ledger coding to identify the departments accountable for each invoice. “We also guarantee our process in terms of findings and paying carriers on time,” mentions Kontoravdis.

The benefits of Fortigo’s applications have been leveraged by several organizations that sought to improve their freight auditing process. Fortigo partners with numerous tier-1 technology companies to ensure the availability of best-in-class technology for its customers, which allows clients to enjoy highly agile services. The company’s responsiveness towards its clients has also made it one among the leading solution providers for logistics IT for over a decade.

Evidencing Fortigo’s commitment to add value to clients is the company’s engagement with one of the top airlines in the U.S., which had merged its operations with another organization for cargo operations. Fortigo’s task at hand was to reconcile the systems with the operations and data pertaining to carriers, freight, and contracts, and automate the processes by deploying a freight auditing application. The process required Fortigo to work with different systems to help the client access all the data from numerous carriers, which Fortigo handled with ease. Eventually, a system was deployed across multiple sub-systems on both the sides following which the client reduced the number of carriers from 150 to 40 and rationalized the usage of each carrier. The venture proved to be a win-win situation for both as the airline could get the best rates from carriers, and the carriers were assured of speedy invoice processing.

Going ahead, Fortigo intends to enrich its freight auditing application to help clients achieve their objectives faster. The company is currently engaged in simplifying the analysis of supply chain data for vice presidents and directors in organizations, without the need for analysts. The promising force of Fortigo is poised to bring a greater revolution to the freight auditing domain.