Case Study: Corporate

The Challenge

A major issue the company ran into was managing access to hundreds of shipping accounts, which required constant user management and password resets. Worse, former employees still had access to company-sponsored shipping accounts long after they left.

“Managing shipping accounts took valuable time and was a constant annoyance,” says the company’s director of purchasing. “And with our previous system, former employees could still log in and process shipments, and we wouldn’t know about it until after the fact. We may not even find it until we did a complete audit a year later.”

The Solution

PS/Ship software eliminated the manual management of users and the ability for former employees to take advantage of the system by continuing to log in and process unauthorized shipments. By integrating the shipping process with the enterprise HRIS, users were automatically assigned access to the appropriate shipping accounts for cost allocation — and when they left the organization, they were automatically blocked from shipping.

“Now we are able to control who has access to those accounts automatically because it has to come through our corporate network where we have validated that they are 1) an employee, and 2) that they’re authorized to make that expenditure and do that work,” the director says. “This goes beyond cost savings and also provides peace of mind.”

The Challenge

One of the company’s biggest pain points was the disconnect between the systems used to create shipments and the company’s financial system. Employees could create shipments without providing critical departmental charge information, which made it impossible to properly allocate carrier invoices when received.

This disconnect, paired with disparate back-office processes across their offices, led to labor inefficiencies and mystery charges, both negatively impacting the company’s bottom line.

The Solution

With PS/Ship, employees are required to pick from a pre-validated list of department/project costs pulled directly from the company’s financial system. This data, along with PS/Ship’s automated invoice retrieval and pre-processing, helped save the company time and money on invoice processing.

“One of the best things that PS/Ship has allowed us to do is clean up our invoicing,” the director says. “Every week now, department heads receive a report that provides the details they need to see to know that all the shipments are authorized, and the invoices can be paid. This has streamlined back-office processing of invoices exponentially.”

The Challenge

With hundreds of locations across the country, the company was often saddled with fees for address changes or mis-delivered shipments. Time spent managing corporate addresses in a distributed shipping environment was an impossible task.

“There’s always going to be some level of human error — someone forgets a suite number or types the wrong postal code,” the director says. “And before we began using PS/Ship to manage corporate shipping addresses, those mistakes wouldn’t get caught and we would incur fees.”

The Solution

With verified addresses stored in PS/Ship, end users now default to addresses that have already been verified and authenticated by the carrier.

“It makes it nearly impossible to send something to the wrong address, which is huge for us,” the director says. “This has helped us cut back immensely on mis-shipments and charges for address changes.”

The Challenge

Carrier-designed shipping systems often fall short in terms of meeting the needs of distributed corporate entities that manage hundreds of locations and users.

“Operating from so many field locations with so many personnel doing occasional shipments presents purchasing system and shipping challenges for our industry and are probably not uncommon to others,” the director says.

The Solution

PS/Ship is a cloud-based software solution that can be easily
tailored to a company’s processes. This Fortune 500 company
was able to use PS/Ship’s tools to meet the unique needs of
shipping in distributed environments.
“The PS/Ship team has really taken the time to work with
us and thoroughly listen to what the issue is that we’re trying to
solve,” the director says. “They have provided things within their
system that really make it work for our company and its unique
set of challenges.”