Improve customer satisfaction

Rating - from tariff by quotation or contract to booking, bill of lading and invoice – is by many regarded as a trivial and simple task but I am of the opinion that it is not; even amongst the largest and best global container lines, more than a third of all bills of lading are incorrectly rated.
For the line, this means a lot of costly and time-consuming rework as well as a negative impact on cash flow as the freight will not be paid by the customer until the bill of lading orinvoice is correct.
The cost for rework and additional interest easily amounts to more than US$ 25 per incorrect B/L or invoice – in total this may easily amount to more than one million US$ per year.
But what is even more critical is that the shipper does not get paid or have the letter of credit honored until the bill of lading is correct – meaning they will encounter an additional interest on the value of the cargo as well as risk of delayed shipment.
So it can only be concluded that data quality for freighting of bills of lading and invoices is a very competitive parameter and it surprises me why this is not a cardinal focus area for many lines.
Correct pricing and auto-rating is a fairly easy area to attack in order to improve the level of data quality and what really makes a positive impact on the business in terms of improved efficiency and customer added value is overview, integration and cohesion, as well as intelligent usage of all data combined with a rigid pursuit of improving data quality; output will be no better than the input.
Data quality is of extremely high importance to your customers – especially for rates on Bs/L and invoices; if this is not in order, it may well heavily delay their cargo and payment, but also to the line it has a major economic impact.


In this context and to underline the importance of data quality and integration, I would like to state what one of the largest global shippers recently told me:

they are quite frustrated by the quality - or rather the lack of same - and timeliness of data and information received from most lines in a number of elements of the normal business process they further high-lighted poor invoice accuracy as the biggest problem - in some areas as much as 50% of invoices get rejected the first time. The same was the case for bill of lading data quality

They claim this to be because many lines don’t have the link between rates and documentation, and operate many systems which are not integrated.
They also required better e-commerce tools to increase visibility and improve track and trace facilities, but quality of documentation, terminal moves and billing is a top priority, and as conclusion they stated:

Quality and Visibility are keywords – and it is a fact that major shippers will now apply IT usage and data quality as selection criteria to determine which carriers to use.

This means that lines able to substantially improve and lead on data quality especially for rates on Bs/L and invoices, will also be rewarded accordingly by shippers.

On this basis it would make sense to look at enhancements of the pricing and quotation processes.

Apart from having worked directly with software pertaining to this area, I have also made business requirements definition for pricing enhancements and been advisor with main emphasis on topics related to pricing and auto-rating for a number of major lines. Please contact me for a talk about how I can help you.