Company Background
This employee-owned manufacturer and distributor has served the building materials industry for more than 50 years. The company produces high quality, innovative product and service solutions for residential and commercial construction.
Its brands span fasteners, fastening systems, and underlayment tools for general construction, decking, roofing, and exterior applications. The organization leverages global supply chain and distribution networks to serve hardware wholesale, roofing wholesale, independent dealers, chains, home centers, and STAFDA channels. Approximately 90% of its U.S. domestic freight is LTL.
Business Problem
The transportation department lacked automated processes and tools, operating largely through manual effort. This strained resources throughout the transportation spend management lifecycle and likely contributed to errors that increased costs.
The company did not have the resources to continuously negotiate and analyze the best rates or protect itself from rate increases. Limited leverage and a lack of preferred carrier relationships resulted in higher costs and service challenges.
Daily transportation planning required time-consuming manual rate checks across multiple websites and documents—and sometimes even phone calls or emails to carriers. Bill of Lading preparation was also manual.
The freight audit and payment process suffered from the same issues. Auditing and approval were time consuming, and rate disputes were difficult to resolve. Carrier payments required a manual accounts payable process, and freight accruals were cumbersome.
The company had two primary objectives:
Reduce freight spend by securing better rates and ensuring accurate payment of all freight bills.
Significantly reduce the manual effort required to manage day to day transportation—an objective just as important as cost reduction.
Solution – Procurement & FA/P
To address these challenges, the company partnered with TranzAct and implemented multiple transportation spend management initiatives concurrently to reduce costs and daily effort.
Over a 40 day period, they deployed TranzAct’s Freight Audit and Payment (FAP) solution to ensure all freight bills were paid properly, only once, and only for their own shipments. This also created a complete and accurate shipment history database for business intelligence and continuous improvement.
They installed TranzAct’s rate management technology platform to house their rate database and support day to day shipment planning and execution. This provided quick and easy rate lookups and ensured compliance with negotiated rates.
A comprehensive LTL procurement event was conducted through TranzAct’s collective buying program, designed for small and medium sized shippers. By leveraging the combined volume of many shippers operating through a common business system, the company gained access to competitive LTL rates and improved service options—results they could not have achieved independently.
Together, TranzAct’s FAP solution, rate management tool, and procurement program “closed the loop” on transportation spend management and delivered significant benefits.
Value Proposition
The company achieved both of its key objectives.
The initial procurement event significantly reduced LTL freight spend. Since then, the program has limited rate increases and added carriers to mitigate cost pressure. Primary carriers now provide extremely competitive, below market pricing.
With all rates and lanes loaded into the TranzAct rate management tool, the transportation team can seamlessly process BOLs, simplifying daily operations and freeing time for strategic work. The need to call, email, or perform web lookups for rates has been eliminated. Rate negotiation and maintenance are handled by TranzAct, removing that burden from internal staff.
TranzAct’s FAP solution enables quick auditing and approval of freight bills. Duplicate payment checks and GL coding are automatic, and manual effort has been eliminated. Carrier payments are accumulated automatically, and dispute resolution is faster and fully documented.
The time savings have had a significant impact on the transportation team. Staff engagement has increased because they spend less time on manual tasks and achieve more accurate results. The company now has access to transportation expertise without needing to build or maintain it internally. Overall, they operate more effectively while investing less time in the transportation process.