Resource Hub | Case Studies

Results At A Glance:

• Reduced worldwide transportation expenses by 23%
• Increased profit on every order sold

The Situation:

Our client, a wearing apparel industry supplier, was struggling to determine correct international freight prices. Because of this, our client couldn’t accurately provide price quotes to customers. Making matters worse, our client was constantly dealing with suppliers who moved from country to country in order to take advantage of lower production costs. In many cases, the cost of freight EXCEEDED the profit from the entire sales order, thereby making the entire transaction counterproductive and the situation extremely frustrating!

The ICC Solution:

We gladly stepped in and negotiated, on our client’s behalf, a menu of extremely competitive freight rates with a variety of carefully selected global service providers. These service providers were all hand-selected to ensure that they could meet our client’s ongoing needs.

At the same time, we provided our client with a worldwide shipping matrix that included ALL of the relevant carrier rates for destination and weight parameters. We constantly update this guide for our client, who continues to see a remarkable 23%+ savings on their international freight bill. More importantly, however, is that they now see a profit on EVERY order!

Contact us today and find the money you never knew was missing!

Results At A Glance:

• Reduced costs of receiving/auditing/paying freight invoices by 50%
• Reduced freight costs as a percentage of sales
• Created a transportation “profit center”

The Situation:

Our client, distributors of home furnishings, opted to change their freight payment terms from “collect” to “prepaid.” Unfortunately, this change led to two looming logistics problems:

• How to receive, audit, approve and pay thousands of freight bills monthly without incurring additional salary dollars for increased accounts payable staff?
• How to ensure they were getting the best service and the most competitive rates from their freight carriers?

The ICC Solution:

Right away, we understood that a significant cost savings opportunity existed in taking on our client’s freight bill receiving, auditing and payment processing services. This not only led to a dramatic improvement in quality, but the cost savings were staggering: ICC’s processing fees were approximately half of what our client would have paid through the required increase in salary dollars. This took care of problem #1!

For problem #2, we skillfully negotiated Freight-All-Kinds rates with a carefully selected group of freight carriers, which immediately led to significantly lower costs. To ensure that our client had total control over measuring results, we also placed each of the carriers on the same base rate structure so that actual cost savings could be measured on a carrier-by-carrier basis.

Also, to protect our client from receiving freight industry “typical” annual general rate increases, we built multi-year transportation contracts for our client which totally eliminated an annual general rate increase after the first year. Thanks to the combined excellence of ICC staff and our forward-thinking client, our client’s freight related costs have dropped significantly! Voila – problem #2 solved! Furthermore, our client took advantage of ICC’s technology solutions and did not need to invest any money in IT infrastructure to obtain the desired results.

Results At A Glance:

• Improved Customer Satisfaction
• Reduced Shipping Costs
• Improved Transit Times for Customer Deliveries
• Reduced Freight Claims

The Situation:

Our client, a manufacturer of medical equipment was seeking ways to create a world class supply chain but was struggling with how to make it happen. As a long time ICC client we were well aware of their manufacturing processes and procedures which often resulted in customer back order situations, continuous small shipments to customers to fill those back orders, late and damaged shipments as well as ever rising shipping costs. The reality is that our customer did not fully understand their customers’ business.

The ICC Solution:

Since their customers were large medical distributors we encouraged our client to query their customers and recommend weekly consolidated shipments rather than every day small shipments. The response from their customers was overwhelming. The customers now receive their orders complete, on shrink wrapped pallets, with less damage and in less time than the former shipping methods. But the best part is that our client has seen a significant reduction in their annual freight costs to their customers. Talk about creating a world class supply chain.

Results At A Glance:

• Improved customer service
• Reduced freight costs in excess of 18% annually
• Trained staff

The Situation:

Our client a distributor of chemicals and cleaning supplies single sourced their domestic parcel and LTL freight with a nationwide freight carrier for many consecutive years. Over those years the freight carrier became complacent in terms of servicing this customer. Service began to erode, the client was certainly not being treated like a customer any longer and to add insult to injury, their freight costs continued to rise year after year; just imagine less service and higher costs!

The ICC team met with this client and promptly uncovered several interesting facts. The client had been doing business with this carrier for over ten years and in that time NEVER had any discussions with competing carriers; the company moved their warehouse to another state and did not have a sales rep assigned to the new location so their former sales rep who apparently was not receiving credit for this account any longer was certainly not responding to repeated calls for service improvements.

The ICC Solution:

The ICC team determined it was time to raise the bar for this client. We helped them interview several competing carriers and to generate a Request for Proposal for their business with these carriers, as well as the incumbent carrier. Now, the incumbent carrier no longer considered themselves “the only game in town.” Finally, we educated their CFO and management team to thoroughly understand their transportation contract provisions so she could finally negotiate from a position of strength. Since she was now in control, we worked with her to not only get the incumbent carrier to respond to all of their service needs, she also had a local sales rep assigned to their new warehouse who is “jumping through hoops” to retain their business while at the same time, saving them tens of thousands of dollars each year. Knowledge is Power!

Results At A Glance:

• Annual invoice audit recoveries in excess of $100,000
• Five Year Contract Savings in Excess of $4.5 Million

The Situation:

Our client a biomedical firm had agreed to pay its package carrier an additional “Shipment Alert Fee” enabling them to receive daily alerts when “Priority” packages were not going to be delivered on time. Upon receipt of the daily e-mails, our client spent a good part of their day re-scheduling those late deliveries. Our client actually never really considered the benefits of implementing an outsourced parcel carrier invoice audit. The same company was also negotiating its contracts with their transportation service providers WITHOUT the help of a knowledgeable transportation consultant.

The ICC Solution:

By outsourcing the audit of their package carrier invoices to ICC Logistics Services, Inc. late delivery credits and ALL invoicing errors are now completely documented and FULL refunds are being credited to our client each and every week. But, that’s not all; ICC also performed our Proprietary Benchmark and Target Pricing Analysis and determined that this client was SIGNIFICANTLY overpaying their package carrier for years. ICC assisted the client in optimizing their carrier’s contract and over the next five years will add additional profits to their bottom line in excess of $4.5 Million.

Results At A Glance:

• Global Parcel Savings: 22.1%
• Domestic LTL Trucking Savings: 57%
• Domestic Truckload Savings: 44.4%
• Third Party Logistics Savings: 24.4%

The Situation:

A manufacturer of Communications Equipment was struggling to get their arms around their global transportation expenses which were in excess of $14 Million annually. The company had three major Business Units and while each division was responsible for their own transportation and logistics expenses through a network of logistics professionals in each division, they sought ICC’s assistance to help them better understand how to benchmark and ultimately reduce those costs. You see they actually thought they had the best available Global Transportation and Third Party Logistics rates with their current service providers.

Our initial analysis indicated that globally they were utilizing over 100 different carriers and logistics service providers, many of whom provided exactly the same services. We also noted that 50% of their gross spend was in accessorial fees; they did not have any formal Transportation Contracts with their service providers and they were never able to benchmark their rates to ensure they were in fact receiving the best possible service at the lowest available costs.

The ICC Solution:

Our first step was to evaluate the service providers our client was utilizing and the rates that each one was charging. Which ones were the most capable of providing the best possible service; which were willing to trade significant additional business for more competitive pricing; and which ones were willing to enter into transportation contracts over multiple years which guaranteed them consistent business at competitive rates? The results were extraordinary. We reduced our client’s service provider usage from over 100 to less than a dozen globally. Our client now has strong strategic alliances for the long term, contracts which not only benefit our client but also their service providers. And, the bottom line financially-annual savings for Global Parcel Shipments, Domestic LTL and Truckload as well as Global 3PL services in excess of $3,500,000 annually, which represents an overall cost reduction of 24%. Our client couldn’t be happier!

Results at a Glance:

• Identified costly billing errors
• Put the power back in the hands of the shipper
• Recovered $121,000 in billing errors

The Situation:

Our client signed a new FedEx contract. Suddenly, they were now paying more than they were before the new agreement.

The ICC Solution:

This was a very common theme we see among clients. We employed our Contract Audit on the client’s FedEx shipments to determine if the billing was correct.

• ICC examined all aspects of the contract and re-rated every shipment to validate the accurate base and earned discounts were applied correctly.
• ICC validated if each accessorial charge was being billed at the correct discounted rate based on the new contract.
• ICC validated if the new custom dim factor was being properly applied to each eligible shipment.

In addition, ICC discovered that even though the signed contract did not contain a waiver precluding the client from collecting on credits for late deliveries the carrier inadvertently marked their account as having a waiver and preventing them from collection on refunds they were entitled to. This cost the shipper big.

Next, we provided the client with detailed reports outlining each and every shipment that was incorrectly billed by the carrier and what they should have been billed.

The client was able to go back to the carrier and recover every dime owed to them, to the tune of $121,000 for just 5 months of service. Talk about value!

Results At A Glance:

• Reduced small parcel spend by 15% annually, saving $100K per year
• Improved profit margins, equivalent to over $1M in new product sales
• Successfully optimized the client’s transportation program for long-term financial health