Why Outsource Freight Audit & Payment
According to Campbell, the main reasons to outsource freight payment are that outsourcing:
- Is less expensive than managing the business process in house
- Produces better, more reliable business intelligence
- Results in invoices being paid accurately and freight accounting tasks such as GL coding being completed more quickly
Generally speaking, freight audit & payment is a logical business process to outsource because it requires a tailored, sophisticated solution to be able to produce accurate, reliable data that enables complex analysis and continuous process improvement.
Years ago, many companies relied upon tribal knowledge to get the job done: “In the old days, you had a person who knew rates and lanes,” Campbell remembers. “Outsourcing to Cass makes our process much more efficient. Using a third party is more efficient in getting actual cost data into a system, and you can get better data without having to touch an invoice,” he said.
Summary: Data You Can Trust
When Dole’s transportation team was confronted with the prospect of migrating to a new ERP system and potentially taking a step backward in its FAP process, they immediately reached out to Cass, their longtime service provider. Cass had experience in numerous other ERP transitions and was flexible in adjusting the FAP system to Dole’s environment. Specifically, the Cass and Dole teams worked together to arrive at new processes to manage balance due payments, separately billed accessorial costs, and single invoices representing multiple bills of lading – without losing critical shipment data.
Of course, the Dole-Cass team put together a contingency plan, so that, even if something somewhere went terribly wrong in the transition to SAP, Dole’s carriers would still be paid.
Such an emergency plan did not have to be enacted. The transition proceeded smoothly and the Dole team has accurate data it can trust. With the integration between Dole’s SAP system and the Cass solution operating smoothly, Dole now has visibility to “relevant data that can easily be mined and displayed in financials throughout the organization,” Campbell said. “One of the reasons we have such trust in the system is that it takes little time to reconcile our monthly accruals, and any exception items can be quickly researched and explained,” he added.
