Softeon announced this week the availability of its new Freight Audit and Payment (FAP) system, a solution that can reduce total freight spend and/or eliminate the need for expensive third-party freight audit firms. FAP from Softeon supports parcel, LTL and full truckload shipments, and can rate and audit freight bills across several dozen attributes and accessorials, performing a three-way match between a company’s own shipment information, proof of delivery information and the carrier’s freight bill.
Until now, most companies that audit their freight bills for one or more carrier modes do so using a third party service. In some cases, different third parties are used for parcel versus truckload and LTL. Other companies do not audit their freight bills at all, or only audit truckload and LTL, and not parcel shipments.
With Softeon’s FAP, companies can use the same type of sophisticated software that some third-party audit firms use to identify carrier errors and overcharges. Studies have found such errors and overcharges can represent 2-3% of a shipper’s total freight spend – dollars that can be recovered with the right tools.
Shippers can also save the costs associated with using third-party audit firms. With FAP, companies can identify, document and report on all the overcharges, such as a parcel carrier missing its delivery commitment for a given class of service, a truckload carrier miscalculating accessorial charges, or an LTL carrier misclassifying freight.
While the shipper still needs someone to contact the carriers to obtain the refunds, that can be done easily through a small internal staff or outsourcing just that activity, not the entire audit process, reducing costs substantially.
Softeon’s FAP is a component of its powerful Transportation Management System, which provides broad and deep functionality across shipment planning and execution, parcel management and more.
FAP can benefit companies in every sector, and can be an especially important tool for ecommerce companies or business units struggling to get to profitability by reducing effective shipping costs.
Other components in the Softeon suite include its flagship Warehouse Management System, Labor and Resource Management, Distributed Order Management (DOM), Demand Planning, Routing & Scheduling, and more.
Advanced capabilities of Softeon’s FAP include:
- Revenue and cost allocation to the SKU level to more accurately calculate cost of goods sold (COGS).
- Shipment tracking and customer service capabilities to measure carrier billing and delivery performance.
- Rich analytics such as detailed freight spend and volume analysis, plus a broad array of pre-packaged internal and carrier KPIs.
- A revenue margin management tool for 3PLs that enables then to monitor control buy-sell costs for freight and keep them within specified margin parameters.
FAP is already in use successfully at several Softeon customers, including Sony DADC and Harper Collins in Europe.
“Our new FAP solution was built working closely with several of our customers, and has proven its value in the field,” said Softeon’s Satish Kumar, VP Client Services and Technology.
As with all Softeon supply chain solutions, FAP can be delivered via the Cloud or more traditional deployment.
