The Company
RCS Logistics is one of the world’s leading freight forwarders with specializations in air logistics and retail supply chain. The company is headquartered in Hong Kong with RCS-owned and affiliated offices in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States.
The Problem
RCS Logistics identified that they were not properly billing their customers in the time specified in their customer service level agreements, meaning that invoices were being sent later or earlier than they should have been and also with incomplete data. This contributed to a longer than expected payment cycle as well as an increased workload for the RCS Logistics accounting team, as they were the ones who needed to correct these issues. RCS Logistics requested an easier way to not only improve the correctness of AR invoice sends but also track their performance at a customer and branch level.
The Solution
Solving this problem began with data collection – Prompt worked with RCS Logistics to identify all the different customer service level agreements and all the different information required by these customers in order to send an invoice and not have it rejected. This was a coordinated effort between the accounting, operations, and sales team as well as Prompt employees.
The second component of this task was data presentation. As RCS Logistics already used Prompt’s Business Intelligence portal for visibility, it was the logical location to host this customized view. Prompt and RCS created queries to the CargoWise database, using what was learned during the data collection process, and created views that allow RCS Logistics to quickly and easily answer their four main questions:
- What shipments should have been billed and have not yet been billed yet?
- What shipments are able to be billed but have data missing from RCS Logistics in order to send an invoice?
- What shipments are billable soon but have data missing from RCS Logistics or another party in order to send an invoice?
- Are there any patterns in the above?
The Results
The results were immediate. RCS Logistics gained significant visibility to their AR billing process while decreasing the burden on its accounting department. They also increased their invoicing speed and decreased their invoice rejection rate.
Prompt and RCS Logistics are actively working on quantifying the impact of these results, including:
- Net change in payment speed measured from shipment received at final destination to payment received
- Net change in frequency of invoice rejections for incomplete information
- Net return on investment for project
Once the above are quantified, which will require a few weeks of data gathering to see the full change, Prompt will update this case study.
