Fortune 500 Retailer Finds Cost Savings, Improves Performance with Data Solution
With RateLinx’s TracLinx module, an electronics retailer boosted the accuracy of its shipment tracking data, gaining real-time visibility for data-driven insights into its logistics performance.
The Challenge
In today’s largely disrupted environment, companies everywhere have been forced to look for increased performance in service and cost. Data consistently plagues these initiatives as manual processes affect its quality, accessibility, and timeliness. A data-driven logistics technology solution provider can deliver insights to drive breakthroughs in service and cost, while delivering real-time visibility into shipping, tracking, and invoicing.
A Fortune 500 electronics retailer needed to solve errors in tracking data causing incorrect shipment ETAs. As a result of the inaccurate ETAs, the team could not plan appropriate staffing levels, causing elevated costs, excess stock, and operational inefficiencies. They hoped that with accurate ETAs, they could improve efficiencies, costs, and staffing imbalances.
The retailer worked through a Cost-Savings Assessment with RateLinx to identify raw tracking data issues that were causing incorrect ETAs and develop solutions to improve their performance.
During the initial assessment, RateLinx found shipment milestone updates were lagging on 43.8% of the shipments and missing completely on more than 30% of the shipments. Other times, incorrect or missing location updates were being received from the carrier. Exceptions in the freight payment process were occurring on 35% of their shipments due to tracking milestones being out of sequence. These errors were causing additional overhead with non-value-added manual work to correct exceptions.
The Solution
The retailer needed to resolve tracking data issues, reduce non-value-added manual work, improve working capital, and balance personnel. The company desired improved ETA accuracy, visibility, and clean data to supplement its existing TMS.
RateLinx’s TracLinx module was used to resolve tracking milestone anomalies and correct sequential issues in real time. TracLinx’s AI identified the location updates deemed outliers and the RateLinx data quality team worked with the carrier to fix them. Tracking milestones were properly sequenced by TracLinx, which enabled the TMS to properly generate a voucher to pay the invoice.
Connecting the cost of service to the tracking data, rate-modeling was used to determine performance improvement opportunities, such as adding specific carriers that align with the retailer’s network requirements. The modeling revealed better carrier lane alignment, placing freight that better matched the carrier’s preference. The adjustments created sustainable savings while improving the shipper-carrier relationship through cost and service optimization.
RateLinx completed the deployment of TracLinx in less than 45 days without internal IT resources, and integrated directly with the retailer’s TMS. The system identified sustainable savings of more than 16%. The improved dataset powers foundational KPIs and reporting in a cloud-based dashboard that continues to highlight savings opportunities for the customer.
Exceptions are handled automatically, and improved efficiency reduces costs. The RateLinx data quality team continues to work collaboratively with the carriers to prevent and rapidly resolve invoice and tracking issues. As a result, the retailer can make better logistics decisions with credible results and use reliable data to drive other initiatives.
To learn more:
email: [email protected]
phone: 262-565-6150
web: www.ratelinx.com