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Client Success

School Specialty Masters Shipping and Freight Challenges with ShipLinx TMS and RateLinx Freight Audit & Pay

Overcame shipping and freight challenges to efficiently and proactively manage transportation processes and costs

1 K+
SKUs managed
1
Vendors
1 %
parcel, 25% LTL
School Specialty

RateLinx really provides me with the tools to be able to make these adjustments when I want to make them. Just being able to move quickly has been really big for our company.

– Andy Houtz, transportation director, School Specialty

Overview

School Specialty is one of the nation’s largest school supply distributors. They also design and manufacture products to improve learning outcomes for every preK-12 student.

 

School Specialty used ShipLinx TMS and RateLinx Freight Audit & Pay to efficiently and proactively manage their transportation processes and costs.

ShipLinx TMS logo
RateLinx Freight Audit & Pay

Challenges

  • More than 100,000 SKUs to manage

  • More than 800 vendors

  • Lacked visibility across all of their transportation modes 

Solution

Benefits School Specialty realized with ShipLinx TMS

  • Low cost rate administration and eliminated tariff administration FTE
  • Quick and easy to implement multimodal rate changes
  • Easy to enforce least cost carrier and routing compliance to find new cost savings opportunities for all modes and changed vendor behavior
  • Easily onboarded carriers and new business units quickly
  • RateLinx set up all the EDIs with the carriers to have 100% electronic invoicing that put accountability onto carriers to submit invoices into RateLinx
  • Hybrid TL pricing model for both contracted and spot lanes saved $1M monthly with clear cost/mile and cost/lbs metrics with a healthy mix of contracted and spot lanes
  • Cut labor hours via automation and shifting carrier disputes to RateLinx carrier resolution services
  • Quickly resolved disputes, cut audit backlog
  • Provided insights for successful contract and rate negotiations
  • Standardized rate agreements and kept freight terms, freight costs, and ship figures current and accurate

Benefits School Specialty realized with RateLinx Freight Audit & Pay

  • Quickly identified changes in parcel costs, identified root cause, and renegotiated incentive structure to save $2M annually
  • Match requirements ensured carriers invoiced at quoted spot rates
  • Minimal balances on aged invoice reports
  • No surprises with late billings or posting
  • Accurate, timely, and accessible data used for negotiation, planning, forecasting, budgeting
  • Instantly accessed freight invoice data, lost savings, savings, and potential savings
  • Confidently knew total transportation network costs immediately

Learn more from Penabout School Specialty’s freight management achievements with ShipLinx TMS And RateLinx Freight Audit & Pay.

 

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