Transport management
How goods move: planning, tendering, execution, tracking and what each movement cost.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
Shipments, loads, lanes, carriers, rates and the accessorial charges that arrive after the freight has already been delivered.
Shipment, Load, Stop, Lane, Carrier, Rate, Freight invoice, Accessorial, Event / Milestone
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
APIs, EDI (204, 214, 210) and carrier portals. Milestone events arrive out of order and sometimes twice, so event handling must be idempotent and time-aware.
Shipment identifiers differ between your TMS, the carrier and the customer. Reconciling the freight invoice to the shipment is the join that most freight audit programmes exist to do.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Planned cost versus invoiced cost
Rated at planning, invoiced weeks later with accessorials. Lane profitability built on the planned figure is systematically optimistic.
Accessorials arrive late and unattributed
Detention, re-delivery and waiting time land on an invoice with no link to the operational event that caused them.
Milestones are unreliable and duplicated
Carrier EDI quality varies enormously; a delivery event may be missing, late or repeated.
Freight allocation to the order line
One truck carries many orders. The allocation rule — by weight, volume or value — changes every cost-to-serve number downstream.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| WMS | dispatch to load, and service performance to the pick that fed it |
| ERP | freight cost against the delivered terms priced into the order |
| Customer master | cost to serve, per resolved customer rather than per ship-to |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
How do we get true cost to serve?
Join the freight invoice, not the rate, to the shipment, then allocate to order lines on a published rule. Anything else produces a customer profitability number that will not survive a challenge.
Is carrier milestone data good enough for OTIF?
Only after cleansing and deduplication, and only if you define on-time against the promise made to the customer rather than the carrier's own commitment.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.