Enrich your data [Chapter 7]

For most shippers, spot-buy freight falls outside procurement or booking flows and as a result, a lot of valuable data is not captured and never analyzed. A standardized process makes it easy to add specific data points for analysis further downstream. These data points can be added anytime during the shipment lifecycle. Some information during the requesting phase and certain things just prior to making the booking. Examples of common data points are:

Cost Centers

The most common information that shippers add to a spot-buy freight shipment is related to cost allocation. Usually, they add either the cost center, WBS#, or GL code. Because this information is added prior to booking the shipment, it is always clear who is bearing the final cost. Some shippers even do an automated budget check prior to finalizing the booking by integrating their spot-quote platform with their ERP solution.

Project Or Program Name

Getting to know how much you spend on a project or program can help you track cost, but also help you budget and plan better for future projects or programs.

Reason Codes

The reason why shippers are turning to a spot-buy freight shipment varies and it definitely helps to understand these reasons better. So we always recommended compiling a short list of reason codes and capture these per request. The reasons can be internal, but also external. For example production quality issues, backlog, supplier issues, increase in demand, et cetera. Understanding these reasons will help shippers to look at the root cause better and look at solutions how to prevent it from happening again.

Shipment Type

For a better grasp on the supply-chain movements of an organization, it can be very powerful to understand the direction of each shipment. By that, we don’t mean which way the crow flies, but rather whether the shipment is ‘inbound’, ‘outbound’ or ‘between third-parties. This kind of information can be helpful in understanding the actual flows.

Chargeback

In some cases, freight costs are charged back to a customer or supplier. As most manual processes do not record this kind of information it can be powerful to add this to your automated process.

Reason For Quote Selection

When making a final booking on the Cargobase platform, we mandate users to select one of 4 primary selection reasons, the options are Pricing, Routing, Transit time, or Reliability. This reason is the only piece of information shared with the ‘losing’ providers – which will help them improve on those areas of their business. This information also helps the internal organization understand why certain decisions were made.