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| Shipping Happens |
| Wednesday, 18 March 2009 16:27 | |||
"The whole process for calculating and paying the carriers for freight was not good," he says. "Our company makes motor oils and other fluids used in cars and trucks. Since the products weigh a lot, shipping cost is a very visible item the business is always trying to reduce." And the ERP system should help keep those costs under control. But no such luck. "We had an army of accountants trying to reconcile actual freight invoices to what we had calculated," says the technician. "To make a long story short, this was not working." After several years of this, the company finally upgrades to a new freight payment system. "This system would calculate the lowest-cost carrier for each shipment," the tech explained. "It would know all starting and ending points and the rates of all our carriers, and automatically pay the carrier as soon as the load leaves our plants. This makes the carriers happy, and they give us a better rate." For the first month after the new system rolls out, there are no serious problems. In fact, the system works very well at figuring out which shipper will move the products at the lowest cost, based on the data it has. "But in some cases the system may work too well," says the technician. "One of our customers is FedEx. I suppose they use our products to service their own fleet. Apparently not all the special discounts were entered in the system, because it decided that UPS was the lowest-cost carrier for the shipment to FedEx. "I guess the FedEx people were not happy to see the brown UPS truck roll up to their dock. Needless to say, account executives were called and the customer-specific freight rates were updated."
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