Hamilton Foods used Hitrak's automated rating to put the right price on every job, automatically. Here is how the Waikato food service wholesaler improved billing accuracy and customer trust with the transport management system (TMS) for freight carriers built in New Zealand.

The customer

Hamilton Foods is a Waikato-based wholesaler supplying the food service sector, with its own storage and distribution operation for ambient, chilled and frozen product. It runs its own delivery fleet, which means it carries the freight-operator's problem inside a wholesale business: every delivery has to be priced correctly as well as delivered on time and at temperature.

The challenge

Rating freight by hand is slow and error-prone. Rates vary by customer, zone and product, and surcharges and extras apply in some cases and not others. When rating is manual or corrected after the fact, revenue leaks because extras are missed, and billing queries rise because customers are invoiced inconsistently. The team ends up running manual workarounds to catch errors, which consume time that should be spent serving customers.

What Hamilton Foods did

Hamilton Foods implemented Hitrak's automated rating. Customer rates, zones, surcharges and extras were configured once in the platform, and every job is now rated automatically from the data captured as the job is created and delivered.

• The right rate is applied to every job at the point of booking, with no manual look-up.
• Preconfigured surcharges and extras are applied automatically wherever the rules say they should be, so revenue that was previously missed is captured.
• Rating flows straight through to invoicing, with finance integration to Xero and MYOB available, so the invoice matches what was delivered.

The result

Hamilton Foods reports that the manual workarounds that used to absorb its team's time have been virtually eliminated. Billing is more accurate, all revenue is captured and billed correctly, and, as important for a supplier to the food service sector, customers trust the invoices they receive.

"It's improved our billing accuracy and our customers' trust in our services."

Philip Wisnewski, Director, Hamilton Foods