Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Bolstering the bottom line

There was a good article in this month's Logistics Management magazine titled 5 Challenges You Can't Ignore by Brent Wm. Primus. Primus talks about various areas of transportation that the astute shipper needs to be attentive to - some very good advice in the piece, so check out the article.



The purpose of my blog today though is to highlight a chart in the article originally developed by the great Bill Augello, a transportation attorney who wrote prolifically about transportation law. He passed away in November, 2006, a great loss for the transportation industry. I had the privileged on a number of occasions to meet Bill and to talk with him over the phone. He was passionate about educating shippers and receivers about transportation law so they could make the best decisions in their ongoing shipping transactions.

The chart Augello created showed the amounts one needed to capture from the dollar losses of a claim. It's startling how a minor claim requires a sizeable sale to recover the lost revenue incurred by the uncollected loss or damage claim.


A good example is in the area of claims management and recovery. Figure 1, prepared by Bill Augello, illustrates the importance of recovering claims for loss and damage and shows how unrecoverable claims can erode a company’s profitability. Unfortunately I can't reproduce the chart here, but it is in the article linked above.

Basically, money overpaid to your carriers is money that is being taken from your bottom line. The chart shows, for instance, that a loss of $500 would require sales equal to $10,000 to make up that lost money (based on a 5% net profit margin). So if we recover a $1000 from one of your carriers, that would be equivalent to a sale of $20,000 under the same scenario. Our overcharge recoveries for you are nothing but an addition to your bottom line. As we state on our website, we have recovered millions of dollars for our clients over the years.

Check with us for our freight bill auditing service - your bottom line will thank you!