Freight Controller is pleased to announce the recent launch of our Delivery Status System: the third pillar of our Carrier Check System.
What is Carrier Check?
Carrier Check is a modern, cloud-based system designed to assist shipping organisations with reducing their freight costs and improving their freight customer service monitoring and tasks. Carrier Check has been designed by a team with over 40 years’ experience managing freight.
Carrier Invoice Reconciliation
Carrier Check launched in 2018 with our Carrier Invoice Reconciliation solution for reducing freight costs. The core system for this is our Reconciliation Engine. It houses our customer’s current contracted freight rates with their 3rd party carriers, and on a weekly basis, both carrier invoices and manifest data are ingested; the three data sets are automatically cross verified generating a report. Any errors or potential overcharges are reviewed for patterns of issues by our staff and for assisting with trouble-shooting operational problems and a note is made in the excel report to prompt the customer to take up the potential credit with a suggested amount. The reconciled data is then imported into our Freight Cost BI Dashboard.
Freight Enquiry System
We then launched the second Carrier Check pillar: Freight Enquiry mid-2020. Freight Enquiry is a powerful combination of Freight Controller’s customer service team’s expertise and our back-of-office bespoke Freight Customer Service platform. This system efficiently and cost effectively deals with our customers’ freight queries such as: lost, damaged, or late freight, booking queries etc., and like the Carrier Invoice Reconciliation module, it also connects to a BI Dashboard for transparent KPI data on both our team’s responsiveness to query resolutions, and your carrier’s performance, providing you with detailed accurate data on their ability to meet their contractual obligations.
Delivery Status System
Rounding out our Carrier Check’s freight management solutions is our Delivery Status System. Complimenting both con note Reconciliation & Freight Enquiry with DIFOT (Delivery in Full and On Time) data and electronic POD data, Delivery Status completes the picture on all of your freight activity.
This can be enjoyed as a passive independent, multi carrier DIFOT Report that our team sends to you, or, you can go further with web access to the dashboard that summarises the results.
Carrier Check Suite – Portal Login
Typically, customers will access this data via the Microsoft BI Dashboard self-service login or receive reports via their email. For those customers that wish to access the raw data directly we can build a customised portal access via a web browser. You can investigate data such as:
- If the consignment has been invoiced, reconciled; and is uploaded to our Freight Cost Dashboard
- All the scanning events of the consignment: scanned onto truck; scanned at carrier DC; scanned into Interstate DC; scanned onto delivery truck; and POD scan (where applicable)
- Any Freight Enquiry tickets raised, milestones for resolutions, including whether the resolutions met SLA timeframe KPIs: ours and your carriers’.
Freight Data Analysis
The Delivery Status module of Carrier Check, our third pillar, enables the freight manager to talk with confidence with both suppliers, (carriers), and customers with regard to any potential issues with late and lost freight.
The Delivery Status System can work ‘glove in hand’ with our Carrier Consignment Reconciliation solution for those who want to pursue a claims process, or only pay once the consignment has been delivered. Freight Enquiry helps with understanding which carriers may be having recurrent issues with lost & damaged freight; with what type of product or customer, (geographic location).
Our logistics experts can also use the data to assist with ensuring you have the right carrier matched to the right consignment from a price, service, and operational mode perspective. The 3 pillars of Carrier Check encompass the whole picture of your freight – cost and service optimisation.
Insights and Actionable Outcomes
Freight Controller’s Delivery Status System drives both dialogue and actionable outcomes on delivery performance with both your customers and your carriers. Rather than dealing with anecdotal evidence on whether a carrier is performing badly or not with either a particular town or state, or service the freight manager, or customer service manager, can point to the data; the facts as to whether a carrier is performing well, or they’ve slipped in service performance.
On the other hand, the data can also assist with raising issues of concern with the carrier’s Account Manager and assist with efforts to troubleshoot the area of concern to improve performance. The data can also assist if and when (and indeed provide the why) the shipping organisation decides to review their carrier network in a freight review or tender process.
Carrier APIs
The 3rd pillar of Carrier Check: Delivery Status System, works by sending the data from the carriers straight back into our Carrier Check system. We have so far set up APIs with:
- Border Express
- Fastway
- TNT Express
- and the Toll Group.
Australia Post are currently updating their API and so once they are ready we will be adding Australia Post and StarTrack very soon; we’ll keep you posted (pun intended).
If there’s a carrier that you would like us to add, please let us know; keeping in mind that not all carriers have APIs to export the data to our system. For some of those carriers we may be able to ingest a file with the relevant data as per their capabilities, so please contact us to discuss.
Conclusion
Being in front of an issue is better than first hearing from your angry customer about a problem. Of course, having no lost or late freight is best of all but that’s not practical, especially since COVID and during peak periods, and so it’s best to be aware of an issue on a proactive basis. Our Carrier Check System can help you with this crucial part of your business.