Build Upon Freight Audit: Trax’s Carrier Management Services

Freight Audit and Payment (FAP) is tedious and resource draining when its managed within a shipping organization. When you outsource freight audit and payment and things go smoothly, you can reallocate resources to growing your business. In most instances when your freight audit and payment partner notifies you that an invoice goes into exceptions because it doesn’t match the estimate, contracted rate, or so on, you need to go chase down the carrier yourself to rectify the issue. Depending on your industry and size of your supply chain, you could be doing a lot of back-and-forth with various carriers multiple times a week or even a day.

Trax’s Carrier Management Services builds upon freight audit and works directly with your carriers to rectify the root cause for the issue so it doesn’t re-occur. With our Carrier Management Services, a strong, symbiotic relationship is built with your carriers, and your carrier management process becomes optimized.

As a global leader in Transportation Spend Management with best-in-class Freight Audit and Payment Services and Carrier Management Services, we at Trax will take you through the differences in the carrier management support you get with both freight audit and payment and Carrier Management Services.

Freight Audit and Payment Services

Outsourcing freight audit and payment is trusting the audit and accuracy of your shipping invoices to specialists to audit them against your contractual rates. If an exception is found, the auditor presents you with the findings. While this does relieve your resources from having to audit thousands of invoices, most freight audit providers lack the corrective and preventive actions that follow the discovery, leaving you with repeat errors over time.

Here is what Trax, and other providers, typically include for carrier relationship support as part of freight audit services:

Exception identification—Audit exceptions are a thorn in any transportation manager's side, and finding them is like searching for a defective needle in a stack of needles. We at Trax identify those exceptions and discrepancies through the use of state-of-the-art Total Transportation Spend Management solutions (TTSM 4.0).
Exception resolution—If an exception is found, we move to triage immediately and resolve it through our audit team, if possible. You may have to commit resources to help with resolution, depending on exception management expectations and the specific invoice error.
A/R response—Carriers have the habit of barraging shippers with questions, inquiries, and follow-ups related to accounts receivable, which can be overwhelming to sift through. Trax allows carriers to submit them through a ticket system that automatically transfers tickets in an orderly fashion to a team that can deal with them accordingly.
Customer exception support—Clients can also submit questions and inquiries through a Trax ticket system, ensuring prompt follow up by a team of pooled members who can systematically address these issues without wasting resourcing or time organizing the incoming messages.

Trax offers best-in-class Freight Audit and Payment Services, which comes with local, in region staff to help with carrier support, but we also recognize that enterprise, global transportation requires a more elaborate setup. This complexity is why we created our dedicated Carrier Management Services that build upon and go beyond just freight audit.

Importance of Trax's Carrier Management Services

Carrier management is a discipline within transportation that enables businesses to monitor and manage carrier performance through carrier scorecards, contract and rate management, and claims management. Carrier management is an advantage, if done well, or it can be a challenge that grows over time.

The importance of having dedicated Trax’s Carrier Management Services is immense. The service cannot be regarded simply as a by-product or a bonus, but should be valued on its own, as it can drastically affect your bottom line. The larger your transportation network, the larger your spend and a greater amount of carrier relationships, modes, lanes, and complexity you have to manage. This convolution means it’s critical to adopt our Carrier Management Services along with our Freight Audit and Payment Services.

Trax is at the forefront with our Carrier Management Services, which offers comprehensive and customized error preventive actions. Here are some of our Carrier Management Services offerings:

Prevents exceptions—When Trax finds an exception during our Freight Audit and Payment Services, our Carrier Management Services goes beyond just resolving it. We investigate the cause of the exception to find and fix the root problem so it doesn’t happen again. We continue to diligently monitor exceptions to create a cycle of continuous improvement to ensure you have fewer discrepancies over time until they become nearly nonexistent.
Absorbs audit ROI burdens—Our Carrier Management Services handle pursuing and resolving carrier exceptions while simultaneously helping your team with theirs. Trax takes on your audit ROI burdens to make your team more efficient and free to focus on more strategic tasks.
Creates ROI actualization—We turn system-generated audit ROI potential into actual, fully resolved ROI. You'll be able to plan and budget financially more accurately based on the information your system gives you rather than setting an error of margin that may or may not pan out the way you think it will.
Decreases bill rejections—A whopping 20% of carrier bills are rejected for a multitude of reasons. Trax’s Carrier Management Services prevent this from happening and create a systematic environment for handling bills and getting constant approvals through corrective, and more importantly, preventive action.
Handles A/R inquiries—It’s common knowledge that A/R in transportation is an effort-heavy challenge and, more often than not, the burden falls on your accounting team to track payment status. This confusion not only brings with it a massive headache and resource-drain but will overload your team with dozens of inquiries a day. Trax takes that weight off your shoulders by handling A/R inquiries systematically.

Trax's Carrier Management Services

We offer dedicated Carrier Management Services, rewarding you with consistently high ROI potential and actualization to boost your bottom line and reassign your resources to more strategically essential matters.

Here are highlights of Trax's advanced Carrier Management Services:

Offers global transportation experience

Trax's truly global presence means we can serve our clients on a local and regional scale. Our offices spread throughout North America, Latin America, Pacific and Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa allow us to carry out our FAP and Carrier Management Services on an intimate level.

Our team, consisting of over 500 people across the globe, has the expertise in working with over 40 currencies and multi-modal carriers in more than 120 countries to support our clients. We don't rest on our laurels, however, providing the thought leadership and innovative solutions that only the leading global authority on Transportation Spend Management can provide.

This expertise has allowed us to create Trax's Transportation Spend Management Maturity Model, an intricate roadmap to optimizing your supply chain's financial and operational process to become a global leader in your industry.

Provides dedicated carrier management team

Trax deploys a specialized and dedicated team to each client, specializing in carrier management and possessing expertise in your industry. Our teams are organized by region, mode, and carrier, ensuring they’re intimately familiar with the language, laws, customs, currency fluctuations, taxes, regulations, and more about each country you operate within. All of this makes it possible for our team to build wells of knowledge with you and your carriers that are customizable to your needs.

Having experts in carrier management, your industry, and your operations countries’ laws, regulations, etc., relieves you of the need to pool together resources to create and train a makeshift team. Instead, your resources can focus on going after new opportunities in your market to grow your business.

Improves data quality and compliance

We at Trax realize the critical importance of data, and we practice the perpetual enhancement of data quality and compliance. We do this by structuring a systematic review system on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Daily—Each day Trax’s Carrier Management Services supervisors meet with their team and go over the daily management exceptions report. This high-frequency reporting allows the team to gather quick information on any trends, gaps, or other essential factors concerning audit exceptions, enabling us to act instantly if something doesn't seem right.
Weekly—Teams hold forecasting sessions every week to ensure client-specific priorities are maintained and met. This periodic review gives our clients more flexibility and customization over Trax’s Carrier Management Services, and makes the entire approach proactive.
Monthly—Carrier and client business reviews are conducted monthly to share data, provide recommendations to improve data quality, and measure and enhance program performance. One month is sufficient to give us both a macro and micro view of the progress and align our Carrier Management Services to the changing situations of our clients.

Our framework makes it possible to proactively and continuously forge better carrier performance and data quality to focus on root-cause resolution, as well as position our clients to always know what’s happening and come by easier gains. Furthermore, it keeps communication lines open and builds your carrier relationships.

Responds proactively

Trax's Carrier Management Services team proactively engages carriers on a weekly basis to identify and resolve billing, audit, and payment issues, as opposed to waiting for a ticket to trigger issue resolution. This proactive mindset allows us to expertly mitigate risk and constantly achieve objectives and surpass expectations.

This proactive approach sets you in the position to better plan and forecast for the future. You have the data, optimized processes, and support you need to create an agile supply chain that can weather any storm and take advantage of opportunities that may arise.

Takes root-cause corrective action

Trax's Carrier Management Services team goes beyond the standard audit services to identify and resolve issues at their root cause. Issue resolution isn’t where we stop either—our team implements robust preventive measures and monitors to ensure it never occurs again in the future.

By constantly implementing root-cause corrective and preventive measures, we decrease errors to the point of near-elimination. You gain optimization, better budgeting and forecasting, and the peace of mind to successfully grow your market share.

Delivers carrier leadership

Diligently leading A/R reconciliation reviews, weekly status calls, and monthly carrier business reviews on behalf of our clients, with help of robust analytics, is another part of what our Carrier Management Services team does. This proactive A/R support dramatically increases efficiency, as it drastically decreases your workload and allows you to allocate resources elsewhere.

Weekly status calls ensure proactive invoice exception management while monthly business reviews center around improving collaboration among you, Trax, and carriers, in terms of meeting expectations, performance, and possible opportunities.

Drives results and carrier performance

Many industries—such as tech, healthcare, life sciences, CPG, manufacturing, and retail—rely heavily on carrier performance to maintain market share, client satisfaction, and profit margins.

We use comprehensive tools to evaluate areas of opportunity or any gaps that need addressing, including how well potential carriers align with your goals and needs. At Trax, we’ve perfected our Carrier Management Services on a global scale. We’ve found that our clients that use our Carrier Management Services have stronger relationships with their carriers, faster payments, more significant cost reductions, and improved data quality.

Gain Unmatched Carrier Management Services

Trax's comprehensive carrier services are unlike anything you will find on the market. We improve data quality and compliance, handle all carrier issues and concerns on your behalf, partner with you on initiatives to elevate carrier performance, and proactively respond to carrier concerns.

Moreover, we bring our expertise, innovation, and unparalleled mastery of Transportation Spend Management to the table, helping you optimize your entire supply chain and increase your bottom line. To learn more about our Carrier Management Services, contact Trax today.