The rapid growth in e-commerce markets demands an equally rapid and innovative response from transport and logistics businesses. For fleet owners, handling multiple parties with different interests, collecting and categorizing scattered information, managing relationships, and measuring data can be overwhelming. Of which, auditing the freight, analyzing the invoices for inconsistencies, and accounting for every dollar spent can be a daunting task to be carried out, in-house. To that end, companies outsource some or all parts of their workflow to freight audit and payment service providers who can negotiate and verify if these companies pay only for their consignments. Freight audit and payment service providers offer shippers direct access to rates from a global digital carrier network, with real-time quotes.
Freight audit and payment service providers are continually reinvesting in up-and-coming technologies to provide companies with the ability to realize efficiencies, calculate potential savings opportunities, predict trends, and manage costs. Effective freight audit and payment analytics technology saves valuable time by automating freight audit processes, such as data collection, data cleansing, invoice review, payment processing, and supply chain reporting. On the other hand, several providers also come up with transportation execution technologies that benefit companies with increased speeds and decreased latency.
In the process of empowering organizations with the capacity to support and deliver significant freight cost savings, freight audit and payment service providers are responsible for providing an audit trail and ensuring if the final amount is accurate before processing the payments. When it comes to invoice consolidation, these vendors check if the customer is receiving one weekly invoice in one familiar format that is precise and streamlined for processing and payment.
To provision better visibility of the supply chain operations, these vendors offer reports and interactive digital dashboards with personalized filters that enable businesses to track and monitor their KPIs. Alongside, these freight audit and payment companies consult with their clients on a regular basis to set goals and ensure that processes, rules, rate agreements, and other essential elements are aligned with baselines and requirements. There is an increasing collaboration across the entire ecosystem, while leaders in the space are pursuing greater outreach and cooperation across the whole value chain. All participants working more intimately with intermediate customers, shippers and 3PLs, end customers, and technology providers focus on the goals that bring greater efficiency, speed, and accuracy.
This edition of Logistics Tech Outlook on freight audit and payment features companies that are at the forefront of offering customer-centric services. In the last few months, a distinguished panel comprising CEOs, CIOs, VCs, and analysts along with our editorial board reviewed the top companies in the domain and shortlisted the ones that are at the helm of tackling challenges in the freight audit and payment domain. The companies compiled in this issue have exhibited extensive business process knowledge, along with in-depth, integrated, and innovative strategies in the space.
We present to you Logistics Tech Outlook’s "Top 10 Freight Audit And Payment Consulting/Services Companies 2019"
