Intelligent Audit
Advocating Smart Shipping with Actionable Intelligence

Supply chain optimization allows shippers to reduce the total cost of goods sold and thus highly impacts a company’s profitability—a fact further reaffirmed by the pandemic’s adverse effects on global logistics operations. The pandemic caused considerable volatility proving that the absence of a consolidated view of a company’s freight activity and spend could cripple a business in no time. Shippers traditionally have relied on a simple freight audit to catch errors in billing. However, simple post-auditing to see the mistakes on an invoice is not enough in a volatile, post-pandemic business landscape. Why? Shippers need better data that is ingested, normalized, and analyzed to make better decisions that yield better outcomes. Therefore, shippers need to transform away from simple freight auditing and look towards using advanced analytics and machine learning technology. Digitizing freight auditing data into structured data by ingesting data from all transportation modes and the related activity provides a mechanism for a shipper to glean actionable insights guiding the shipper to make smarter decisions that improve the overall efficacy of their supply chain.

The shipper transformation starts with partnering with a company with the reputation of best-in-class freight auditing. Still, it is at the forefront of applied data, using modern technology, such as machine learning to more quickly surface issues and guide shippers to logistics network optimization.

“Shippers have several initiatives like tracking inventory flows, maintaining delivery schedules, or clearing supply chain backlogs.

Intelligent Audit’s platform provides actionable data intelligence. Hence, shippers see meaningful insights from their freight audit data to make data-based decisions as a guide to optimize their logistics networks,” says Hannah Testani, CEO of Intelligent Audit.

The renowned technology services company’s portfolio of automated audit and freight recovery, business intelligence, and transportation optimization solutions is focused on reducing clients’ total transportation costs.

Shippers who have insight into their shipping activity, shipping spend and analytics for better decision-making can optimize their supply chain using facts and data, not emotions or anecdotes. Furthermore, the insights help shippers develop better transportation strategies and prevent over-billing on shipments through anomaly detection powered by machine learning.

Freight Auditing with a Difference

Intelligent Audit’s comprehensive freight audit and recovery platform leverage groundbreaking technologies like AI and ML to bring a revolutionary level of supply chain transparency. It automatically reviews and validates all kinds of shipments, helping shippers verify freight charges and avoid additional shipment costs.

Typically, customers’ supply chain data feeds across WMS, TMS, OMS, or transportation invoices don’t score high, so they are neither insightful nor actionable. Intelligent Audit applies machine learning algorithms to customers’ data to refine the quality and search for anomalous patterns in those datasets.

Intelligent Audit’s proprietary platform provides full freight audit functionality across all transportation modes and regions with strong expertise in deep learning models that are extremely good at bucketing long and short term patterns.

It has proven extremely useful in detecting real-time anomalous patterns in transportation invoices outside freight auditing issues. The prescriptiveness and context around the anomalous spikes enable shippers to resolve unexpected issues as they occur.

Take the case of a heavy freight company with a few hundred thousand freight shipments a year across LTL, air, ocean, and other modes of transportation. As their freight auditing process was bottlenecked by archaic technology processes and lack of data transparency, they could not use that data to make smarter procurement decisions or fuel their logistic operations. But it all took a different turn as soon as the company onboarded Intelligent Audit as their freight audit partner.

Since none of the executives at the freight company had ever gone through the process of questioning the data integrity and truly cleaning it to make it transformative, Intelligent Audit first took their invoice data. Then, it cleansed it with its business intelligence and analytics platform.

After the cleansing stage, Intelligent Audit clearly showed the client the specific lanes where they were using carriers with poor performance and slow transit times, increasing their costs.

Shippers have several initiatives like tracking inventory flows, maintaining delivery schedules, or clearing supply chain backlogs. In addition, shippers use the Intelligent Audit platform provides actionable data intelligence. Hence, shippers see meaningful insights from their freight audit data to make data-based decisions as a guide to optimize their logistics networks

“Having a concise overview of their transportation data through one platform enabled our client to make transformative decisions regarding future transportation strategies and reduce shipping costs with increased supply chain visibility,” says Testani.

Helping Customers Scale with Confidence

Besides helping organizations deliver faster to their consumers at cost-efficient rates, Intelligent Audit focuses on empowering shippers to ship efficiently. It is aware of the difficult of predicting ‘what if scenarios’ withOUT statistical models. IA is aware of the difficulty in predicting ‘what if scenarios’ with statistical models and data simulations. Therefore, it requires advanced technologies. Intelligent Audit empowers its customers with its proprietary business intelligence platform to access up-to-the-minute advanced transportation analytics for shippers who ship anywhere from 10 shipments per week to over one hundred million shipments a year.

In general, shipment data reports are vibrant and robust. But when data is stuck inside Excel sheets or PDFs, shippers can’t use that shipping data to make informed business decisions. This is why clients always rely on Intelligent Audit’s sophisticated platform. It enables them to make the most of reliable invoice data that’s been cleansed and normalized. This helps shippers determine more innovative transportation strategies while controlling costs. This ability to scale and optimize their supply chain across all modes of transportation with data-driven analytics makes organizations repeatedly seek Intelligent Audit’s services.

The Tokens of Success

Best articulating the proficiency of Intelligent Audit’s state-of the-art platform is a series of success stories where companies have overcome supply chain silos and improved transportation networks, achieving greater operational efficiency.

A heavy parcel shipper with over 80 million parcel shipments per year kept getting hammered by new transportation charges levied by carriers. They wanted to spot gaps in their supply chain to frame better transportation strategies and reduce shipping rates. But they had been working with a supply chain consultancy company that lacked a technology edge. As a result, it took weeks to perform each optimization analysis to increase its visibility and reveal. To take control of their transportation network, they reached out to Intelligent Audit for an overview of their transportation data, consolidated on one platform, and to strengthen their supply chain by detecting inefficiencies.

After deploying Intelligent Audit’s highly advanced platform, the company began actioning over $50M worth of cost-saving initiatives identified through the IA software. The system identified distribution centers using the wrong box sizes, paying for dead space, premium express services where ground shipping was faster and cheaper, and various options where regional carriers could have serviced them better. The platform revealed they were paying a lot for dead space and using air freight where regional carriers and ground transportation would be faster and more cost-effective. The client immediately changed its freight network, reducing expenses and increasing delivery speed.

Staying true to its vision of promoting smart shipping in the digital age, Intelligent Audit plans to keep enhancing and upgrading its platform to help more companies convert massive amounts of disparate data into actionable business intelligence in real time. Intelligent Audit is also working toward helping companies moderate shipping costs based on the shipment’s contents.