Navigating the intricate world of freight claims management requires the assistance of a knowledgeable, capable service provider – and a keen eye for indicators measuring the effectiveness of your chosen partner. How do you know if you’re getting the most out of your freight claims? Which metrics reveal if your service provider is maximizing your investment in their services?

Hallmarks of Effective Freight Claims Management

The most compelling sign of an effective freight claims management service provider is proof of their capabilities. Ask yourself whether your provider (or any provider you’ve considered) has had any success in claims recoveries. For example, over the past two years, nVision Global has filed nearly 8,000 freight claims on behalf of customers, resulting in an 87% recovery rate and more than $7 million recovered.

Once you’re certain of a service provider’s ability, establish your expectations. How often do they report on claims (both successful and unsuccessful)? Which reporting metrics do they track (dollars recovered, time to resolution, etc.)? What does their client or caseload look like, and where does your company fall into the priority hierarchy?

The first step in choosing a freight claims management partner is developing rapport. Ensure they can meet your expectations and be transparent in setting those expectations.

Metrics for Freight Claims Management

When quantifying the effectiveness of freight claims management, you should consider several key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Claims-filing rate is how often you file claims for damaged or lost freight. A higher rate can be an indictment of a carrier or could mean your claims management provider is quick to process claims that might otherwise go unpursued.
• The claim recovery rate is the percentage of claims successfully resolved in your favor. A higher claims recovery rate indicates your claims management provider is doing a good job of negotiating with carriers and getting the compensation you deserve.
• Claims-processing time is how long it takes to process and resolve claims. A shorter claims-processing time is desirable and shows your claims management provider is efficient.
• Claims cost is a measure of the total cost of processing and resolving claims. A lower claims cost may indicate your provider is effectively controlling expenses while maximizing your bottom line.

Carrier performance metrics are related to the above KPIs. These metrics include the number of claims filed against each carrier, the claims recovery rate for each, and the average processing time for those claims.

Other Considerations

In any partnership, there will be intangibles to consider. When evaluating your freight claims management service partner, keep the following in mind:

• Customer service, support, and experience
• Communication, responsiveness, and rapport
• Flexibility, capability, and scalability
• Cost-effectiveness and value based on terms

Remember, freight claims management is more than just a positive impact on your bottom line. It’s about having the confidence to delegate this critical aspect of your logistics operations to someone you can trust.

Freight data is invaluable in the modern era. It’s necessary for decision-making at every phase of operations, and it provides the insights necessary to ensure continuous efficiency. But data is only as valuable as it is accurate, and for many shippers, data accuracy can be a challenge.

Incorrect data can do as much harm as current, correct data can help. Companies need to practice data cleansing, including the sanitization and maintenance of aggregate data. Confidence in your data yields confidence in the insights it offers, which leads to certainty in operations.

Best Practices for Data Cleansing

Good data results in trustworthy insights. To ensure the accuracy, timeliness, and efficacy of freight data, follow these essential sanitization steps:

• Practice routine audits: Remember data is constantly in flux and evolving. Auditing is the simplest way to spot-check data to ensure it is timely and accurate.
• Automate aggregation: Manual data entry is rife with opportunities for mistakes – just consider the entire process of freight audit! Automate aggregation wherever possible.
• Maintain a golden record: A golden record is a master record that serves as the de facto source of truth for all systems pulling data. Simply put: Rely on one source of data.
• Standardize formatting: Have a uniform way of recording data and stick to it, so there’s no confusion or variation across aggregated data points of the same nature.
• Scrub data: Establish rules and standards for how to identify errors and remediate (or remove) them.
• Partner with professionals: Find an established partner with experience automating freight audit and payment activity for any transportation provider – regardless of location or invoice format.

Advantages of Data Cleansing

• Increased Efficiency: Order processing, routing, and scheduling are all made possible by clean data. By getting rid of unnecessary data, you can improve your supply chain management.
• Cost reduction: Precise data helps save on expensive errors such as rerouting, misplaced shipments, or fines for noncompliance.
• Increased Accuracy: Accurate data guarantees that the details of customers, products, and addresses used in freight shipping operations are correct.
• Analyzing data: Meaningful data analysis requires clean data. Shippers are able to recognize patterns, obtain insights into their operations, and make wise decisions.
• Competitive Advantage: In a fiercely competitive market, freight carriers can obtain an edge by keeping their data clean and applying it wisely. They are able to draw in and keep clients by providing more dependable and effective services.

Data Cleansing is the Path to Data Integrity

Data cleansing is the practice of bringing together disparate data and sanitizing it. It’s the process of organizing, validating, purging, and formatting data into a clean record that’s easily deployed across various operational applications. Clean data is error-free, current, accurate, and well-formatted for use.

Clean data is incredibly important in cases of aggregation, where multiple data streams come together. It is important to remove duplicate data, incorrect entries, outdated variables, and anything else that could skew the relevance or validity of the data.

Bottom line: Working with well-kept data means being able to trust the insights it delivers. When it comes to freight data and transportation providers, data integrity is paramount.

There’s a Wealth of Freight Data to Consider

Data cleansing is more valuable when it becomes apparent just how often decisions rely on freight data. Having a master record that’s impeccably maintained paves the way to smarter decision-making on the back of powerful insights.

Take something as simple as transportation provider selection. The spot price for provider A is lower than that of provider B; however, provider A has higher fees for accessorials, while provider B has lower rates for off-peak shipping. Pulling this data from a clean record allows for better comparison and can help shippers make a decision that’s conducive to not just cost and budget but also logistical convenience.

Beyond transportation provider selection, sanitized freight data yields prolific insights. From simplifying freight audits and payments to more agile routing to proactive service-level agreement (SLA) management, well-maintained freight data holds the key to supply chain optimization beyond surface-level cost-benefit analysis.

How Often Should You Clean Your Data?

Every company retains data at a different level. The frequency at which you should clean your freight shipper data depends on various factors. Most IT experts agree that how quickly you gather data or process computer data will have a big impact on how frequently you need to wipe your data.

Several criteria determine how often you should clean your freight shipper data.

• Regulations and Compliance with Data Quality
• Business Objectives
• Sources of Data
• Seasonal Differences

The sheer responsibility and complexity of proper data management can feel overwhelming, especially for smaller companies. Looking for the simplest way to ensure clean data? Work with a proven freight audit and payment company that employs data-first practices and understands the importance of infallible data at the root of insights and decision-making.

The cumbersome time investment of freight auditing has always been its biggest obstacle. It’s why so many carriers have digitized the process in recent years. Digital freight auditing is a step in the right direction, but it requires comprehensive oversight.

Companies can’t just focus on one aspect of cost reconciliation — they need to recognize the many avenues and opportunities for auditing. That means working with an auditing partner who takes a comprehensive, top-down view of digital freight auditing.

Why Choose an Digital Auditing Partner?

Think about how many thousands of checks go into freight auditing. Consider how many errors can arise when a decimal point is misplaced, the wrong rate is entered, or an invoice is incorrectly submitted. Immense manpower goes into resolving these issues, and it might cost dollars to save pennies.

Now, imagine a digital platform that can audit invoices and probe for discrepancies. If the numbers don’t match up, an algorithm performs a series of checks across the dozens of variables a human might manually check. When it finds a discrepancy, it executes a process to identify the problem. This algorithm might perform hundreds of checks on tens of thousands of variables over the span of just a few hours — a task that takes humans days or weeks of time and tens of thousands of dollars each year to accomplish.

Freight auditing partners have access to these types of technologies and the proprietary auditing algorithms that power them. Through a partnership, you’re spending pennies to save thousands. It’s a bottom-line boost no shipper can argue with.

What to Look from an Digital Audit Partner?

The goal in working with a freight auditing partner is simple: recapture otherwise lost dollars through smarter reconciliation. But with so much dense freight data to comb through, not every auditing partner offers the same value proposition. For a freight auditing partner to be truly valuable, they need to offer a gamut of solutions capable of breaking down and processing dense freight data at-scale — whether it’s a few hundred reconciliations or a few hundred thousand.

The best next-generation digital auditing partners are those who understand how to leverage smart technologies and resources to rapidly and accurately process invoices. Some of the chief features to look for in an auditing partner include:

• Ability to vet invoices, contracts, rate cards, tariffs/agreements, and coding logic.
• Business intelligence analytical tools with enriched normalized data.
• Integration into a Transportation Management System (TMS) for quick import/export data tracking.
• Electronic data interchange (EDI) images considered value-added tax (VAT) compliant in EMEA (Europe, Middle-East, Africa)/APAC (Asia Pacific) regions.
• Non-commingled remittances in any commonly traded currency.
• Data capture, including dedicated customer defined data fields.

The amount of data associated with freight transportation invoices is only growing. Auditing is about more than matching up costs — it’s about combing through the many layers of dense data to figure out exactly why they don’t match. Faster, smarter, more accurate reconciliation doesn’t just save companies money; it helps them operate leaner.