Most companies are months behind in looking at their freight spend. RateLinx real-time freight analytics lets you know what’s working and what’s not. In today’s data-driven world, the old methods of freight management simply aren’t good enough. Companies that want to create a competitive advantage by improving the performance and profitability of their logistics and shipping operations know that real-time freight analytics are crucial to optimizing their freight management practices.

Many companies that we talk to have set up their freight analytics with the right approach. They grab their freight invoice data, their Transportation Management System (TMS) shipment data and their order data and try to combine them together and standardize the data. The challenge they face is making it be real-time because the way that they are trying to accomplish this is manual and laborious. Even worse, they are often pulling this information from sources that are weeks, if not months, behind

Three Major Problems Caused by Stale Freight Analytics

Most companies are looking at their freight performance on a spend perspective with stale, outdated data. If your freight analytics data is old, so is your shipping intelligence. Companies make changes to their strategies and expect to achieve savings but wait months to figure out if the new strategies were effective. Worse, if the changes weren’t effective, they don’t have the data to understand why.

There are three major problems caused by stale freight analytics:

  1. Higher freight costs
    Because most companies can’t automatically tie an invoice to an order number, they don’t receive a true picture of what they are actually spending on freight. If they are being overcharged or using inefficient carriers, they won’t know about the problem, much less be able to solve it, until they go through a slow, manual freight audit process.
  2. Inability to see customer trends
    Freight management is about more than just saving money, it’s about getting the best performance for your customers while maximizing your efficiency, reliability, and performance. Without real-time information about your orders, you cannot see how your customers actually use freight, which carriers are underperformer or overcharging, or about possible delays.
  3. A higher burden on IT resources
    Because so many companies have to clean and match their invoice, TMS and order data by hand, many have a person or even an entire department that is dedicated to combining and standardizing the data.

Real-time Analytics Creates Competitive Advantage

I like to think of real-time freight analytics as a guide to the best route to greater efficiency and profits. If your company’s shipping and logistics operations have lost the way, you can’t course correct without an accurate, up-to-date map. The accurate, real-time RateLinx Enterprise Suite and PayLinx Intelligent Invoice Management (IIM) leads to data-driven, state-of-the-art shipping and logistics management.

With PayLinx, you’ll know about a problem as soon as it arises and be able to correct it before costs add up. Real-time freight analytics will give your company a major strategic advantage over the competition.

RateLinx Provides Real-Time Analytics

At RateLinx, we pride ourselves in providing real-time freight analytics software solutions that are:

  1. Customized
    The analytics that we provide are customized to meet the company’s needs. Intelligent Invoice Management captures the data needed to pay the invoice, along with the data the company needs to have the proper context such as order number, item number, customer ID, etc.
  2. Strategic
    As part of our Enterprise Suite, Intelligent Invoice Management is able to provide many benefits through integrating the invoice, shipment and order data sets together and standardizing that data in real-time. Now, this data provides real-time analytics to show a company a non-optimal carrier is chosen and how much it costs the company to notify customer service if a shipment will be delivered late, and free up IT resources used to pull data and provide reports. Real-time analytics will allow companies to create more complex logistics management strategies. This provides a huge competitive advantage for the companies that are able to harness the power of IIM.
  3. Fast
    Because of the streamlined, efficient way we deploy IIM, many of these benefits can materialize within 30-60 days. Companies are able to start saving money immediately due to the reduction in the burden on internal resources for reports and data. IIM allows a company to plug the small profit leaks very quickly while the data is still being collected for the overall strategy. Because there isn’t a large upfront cost for installation of RateLinx Enterprise Suite and Intelligent Invoice management, we often see an instant payback period.

There’s no reason to wait. Traditional freight audit and analytics are just not good enough anymore. Get the accurate, real-time data you need to maximize the effectiveness of your shipping operations and freight spend with Intelligent Invoice Management. Please contact us to find out how quickly you can start saving money and improving your logistics management practices.