Background 

Economic changes in recent years have affected the financial elements of imports & exports dramatically. With limited liquidity in business, even a small mistake in invoicing can put a small importer into financial crisis, not to mention the expanding volume of logistics invoicing required in an ever more global sourcing programs. However, with limited human resources, the validation of the amounts in invoices has become a time-consuming process. Ensuring that the correct amounts are charged for actual services provided is now vital to companies to survive tough economic times.

As a logistics provider, we know the shipments of our customers very well and we are well-positioned to tell how, what and when shipments occur. We are in the best position to audit carrier invoices to ensure no rip-off by the carriers.

One of our customers recently switched from using one single carrier to four carriers. This expansion in the number of carriers dramatically increased the number of invoices and invoice formats handled by this customer daily. Our customer understands the importance of auditing their carrier invoices to prevent over-payments; therefore they wanted to make sure that these invoices were verified in an accurate, quick and cost-effective manner.

Situation

This customer was presented with choices; either to increase their internal resources to match the level of auditing required, or to outsource the work to a professional auditing service provider. The high cost of hiring and training a new staff was identified as unjustifiable and inefficient.  They recognized that further manual auditing is too time-consuming: it sometimes required more than 15 minutes to audit a single invoice against shipment dates and related rates, the containers used, as well as ensuring the invoice is not a duplicate charge. 

They also realised that manual auditing was prone to human errors in matching rates and logging invoices. It was clear that an automated solution was the best way to tackle the problem.

Result

OOCL Logistics introduced PODIUM® Payment Audit System. With built-in audit rules designed to fit numerous businesses and audit requirements, the entire audit process (from invoice receipt to audit and report generation) is computerized and runs automatically as per customer needs. We also incorporated our years of vast logistics knowledge and valuable experience into our industry-leading PODIUM® Payment Audit System to enable easy point and click audit process customization.
 

• The customer can capture all audit results into their internal system and rest assured in paying their carriers on-time and in the correct amounts.
• No extra staffing is required to manually check invoices. Detailed error logs are generated by the system and sent directly to the customer’s carriers for review and billing correction.
• This customer now has a clearer picture on carrier invoice performance, giving them better bargaining power for negotiating new rates when service levels have been lacking.
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• To further elevate our auditing services to provide all-around solutions to our customers, OOCL Logistics will extend the auditing capability to all transportation modes and logistics invoices in the coming years. In the future customers will be able to completely outsource such tedious works to us as a one-stop-shop for auditing. Apart from shippers, OOCL Logistics will also be expanding our system to serve new target customers such as NVOs. We will be developing systems to process complex buy and sell rate auditing so that our customers can focus more time and resources on their core business instead.