If you’re like most companies, your business is in constant motion. You barely have enough time to read an article, much less implement new services into your business. You’re interested in reducing your parcel spend, but you’re not sure where to start – and you sure can’t sacrifice hours out of your daily workload.
Here are 3 practical solutions for immediately reducing your parcel spend– each taking 30 minutes or less to see results. Additionally, each solution can be implemented without any out-of-pocket expenses or upfront costs.
1) Audit your Parcel Invoices
- Time Commitment: 10-minute registration.
- Savings Potential: 2-6% of your small package spend.
- Summary: Every parcel shipment is guaranteed to deliver at a certain time. If your package doesn’t deliver on-time, you are eligible for a full refund on the shipping charges. In addition, parcel invoices are riddled with refundable billing errors. Using a parcel auditing service is a guaranteed way to ensure that you’re not leaving money on the table for Service Failures and/or Billing Errors.
Most audit providers will simply charge a percentage of the savings captured, so there are no out-of-pocket costs to perform this service – just guaranteed savings.
If you’re currently auditing your own parcel invoices, it’s likely that you’re leaving money on the table. Here’s why - The Challenges Associated With Auditing Your Own Parcel Invoices
2) Monitoring Services
- Time Commitment: 10-minute registration.
- Savings Potential: 3-10% of your small package spend.
- Summary: Address Corrections. Additional Handling Fees. Higher costs due to Dimensional Weight. We’ve all seen them on invoices, but they are hard to track and seem to appear at random. With data monitoring technology, all of these hidden fees can be identified, understood, and mitigated with the proper reports. Perhaps you have a vendor that has an incorrect address saved within their ERP system, and because your account is the bill-to, the $17 Address Correction fee shows up on your invoice. We can identify these instances, and help you mitigate and even eliminate this fee altogether. In addition, FedEx and UPS do not want you to know that if you book an express shipment, and it’s a 1-day transit, you will still pay the express rate even if it went on a Ground truck. We can help you identify when this occurs, so you can learn to cut costs in real-time, by monitoring your shipping data to pro-actively reduce your shipping costs. These are just a few examples of how you can use Monitoring Services to procure savings.
3) Benchmark your Shipping Rates
- Time Commitment: 30-minute strategy call.
- Savings Potential: Up to 50% if you use this intel to negotiate new shipping contracts.
- Summary: If you ship small parcel with UPS & FedEx, the odds are stacked against you. It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain competitive shipping rates when carriers implement an annual General Rate Increase of 4-6%. When you tack on accessorials and other ancillary fees, the annual increase is even greater. Both national carriers have entire floors of employees dedicated to pricing their proposals to maximize their profit. They invest millions of dollars each year into their sales and account managers to be well-versed in contract negotiations. And you, as the shipper, are left taking the advice of your carrier rep that “these are the best rates he/she can give out”. Wouldn’t it be nice to see exactly how your rates stack up – and to be given the blueprint for a savings strategy if your rates aren’t in-line with the market? The essence of the benchmark analysis is to provide your company with a detailed review of how competitive your rates are.