Eliminate Common Shipping Data Errors that Cause Higher Freight Charges

How to Identify and Close Costly Data Gaps in Your Shipping Process

Data entry errors can occur at many points in the shipping process – wrong delivery addresses, incorrect account details, missing or erroneous customer reference numbers, etc.

It’s easy to view each occurrence as an isolated incident, yet when the costs of all the errors are added up, they can significantly inflate your total shipping budget.

Here are a few areas that can be costly:

Third-Party Billing

If your workers are manually keying in third-party billing details to complete an order, you face a high risk of error for these shipments.

If the third party’s name, address, or account number contains errors, the carrier will assess the freight costs back to you, the shipper.

Once that happens, the costs are likely yours to keep. As many companies already know, it isn’t easy to collect the additional freight charges from the customer after the shipment is delivered.

Solution? Integrate your order entry and shipping systems to electronically transmit third-party billing account information, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

Incorrect Shipping Addresses

Carriers will correct an incorrect delivery address for you, but the price for this carrier service is substantial, much higher than many shippers expect.

Depending on the carrier, address correction fees charges may be nearly $20.00 per package to more than $125.00 per shipment.

Additionally, if the delivery address was correct but improperly marked as commercial when it was actually a residential address, the carrier will charge a residential surcharge fee of roughly $5.00 on its weekly invoice.

Solution? You can prevent these hidden charges by adding address verification software to your order entry or multi-carrier shipping system. The best address correction software can be configured to include your company’s business rules related to acceptable addresses, variations and tolerances.

Customer Reference Numbers

Companies who ship products to large retailers need to ensure the retailer’s customer reference numbers are accurately entered in the correct field on the freight bill. The carrier forwards this reference number to alert the retailer of an incoming delivery, a critical key to keep their inbound receiving operations flowing smoothly.

Shippers who omit or enter the number with errors will face significant fines from the retailer.

Solution? Automate the capture of reference numbers, so they are automatically included in the order-to-shipment process.

Regular Invoice Analysis

Another best practice is to perform carrier invoice analysis regularly to identify delivery problems and resolve them before they amount to significant dollars. This is often too time-consuming to perform manually.

Solution? Consider adding invoice analysis services to track carrier performance. Many services, such as ShipMatrix, automate and streamline this process, including capturing historical shipping details, potential carrier refunds, and other ways to reduce shipping costs.

Perform a Data Audit of Your Order-to-Delivery Process

The above ideas represent some of the most common data entry risks, but it’s not unusual to find other risk areas in shipping operations.

In the past, eliminating data entry gaps between all the systems that make up a supply chain was not a speedy or straightforward process.

Today’s technology solutions have made it much easier for companies to integrate multiple systems to close these gaps. All it takes is common sense and a good checklist to ensure that data entry gaps are being identified and closed.

CLS can help you identify data entry issues and create an integration plan that will eliminate errors and accelerate domestic and international shipping processes. By adding InfoShip®/Vx, our multi-carrier shipping solution, you can also gain significant cost savings by managing all of your carriers on one platform, configured for your business rules.

Learn More

Five Ways to Reduce Unexpected Carrier Back Charges
Four Proven Ways to Reduce Shipping Costs

Rick Williams, President, and CEO of Creative Logistics Solutions (CLS), is a shipping systems technology expert with advanced experience in shipping and supply chain operations. CLS helps companies improve warehouse productivity by combining streamlined workflows with multi-carrier shipping software, integrated pack/ship stations, data collection, and more.