Sustaining Six Sigma 'Control' via Fulfilment Autonomous Claims Engine

What are the Key Takeaways from this Executive Summary?

• Why Control slips: improvements that were designed carefully are checked casually. Accessorial charges creep back in because nobody reads them all.
• What automated reading changes: every charge gets compared against the contracted terms and the operational timestamps for the same movement, rather than a sample at month end.
• Where it stops: the dispute is drafted, with the evidence attached, and waits for a named person to approve, edit or reject it. Filing is a commercial act and stays with your people.

Why Do Supply Chain Improvements Fail During the Control Phase?

For a Director of Finance or a Supply Chain Controller, getting through Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control is real work. Teams spend months on the analysis, renegotiate carrier contracts and redesign lanes to bring freight spend down and On-Time In-Full up. Then the gains fade. The cause is rarely the Improve phase. It is almost always Control.

You can check whether it has happened to you. Take the savings case from your last programme, and read the same lines for the most recent quarter. If nobody has, that is the finding.

Control cannot be sustained by a monthly spreadsheet review or a quarterly business review. By the time a finance team spots a rise in terminal dwell or a wave of accessorial charges, the money has gone. The charges are invoiced, the quarter’s margin is set, and the only move left is defensive.

Freight is volatile — terminal capacity, chassis availability, customs holds — so the control has to run at the same speed as the thing it controls. When the check depends on somebody remembering to do it, performance drifts back towards where it started. Holding a process in control means reading every shipment against the agreed baseline and flagging the ones that differ, as they happen.

What is a Fulfilment Autonomous Claims Engine (FACE) and How Does It Work?

Start with the charge itself. When a container lands at a port, or a full trailer reaches a cross-dock, free time starts running. Delays caused by the terminal, by chassis shortages or by the carrier still end up as demurrage and detention on the shipper’s invoice. Demurrage is the charge for cargo sitting past its free time; detention is the charge for holding the equipment.

Disputing one has always meant an analyst assembling gate-out timestamps, GPS positions, warehouse check-in logs and delivery receipts, reading them against the contract, and writing the dispute. It takes hours per charge. That is why many finance departments write these off as the cost of doing business — and why the savings from the last improvement programme quietly reverse.

Runink FACE changes where the effort goes. It reads the milestone records an operation already holds. When an invoice carries a demurrage or detention charge, it compares that charge against the contracted free time and the operational timestamps for the same container. Where the records do not support the charge — a port closure, or a container gated out inside the window — it assembles the documentation and drafts the dispute.

What it does not do is file it. The draft goes to whoever signs disputes, who approves, edits or rejects it. That boundary is deliberate: a dispute is a commercial message to a carrier you have to keep working with, and a wrong one costs more than the charge. Nor does FACE predict what a dispute programme will recover. What you can recover depends on which of your charges are genuinely unsupported, and only your own invoices establish that.

How Can Supply Chain Controllers Maintain Sustainable Cost Reductions?

The traditional rhythm is reactive: the invoice arrives, the charges are approved, and someone works out weeks later why freight spend was over budget. That is the opposite of what a Control phase asks for, which is a correction as soon as the process strays.

The shift is to check at execution. When a vendor ships part-load instead of consolidating to the agreed routing, or a drayage provider keeps adding pre-pull charges, those are visible on the day. Read then, they are a conversation. Read at month end, they are a write-off.

That is what makes negotiated savings show up in the accounts. It also changes behaviour across the operation: when every accessorial charge is read and every routing deviation is logged, compliance becomes the default rather than the aspiration. Not because anyone is being policed, but because the deviation is visible to the person who caused it.

Why Does It Matter How a Finding Reaches Someone?

Information decays. The value of knowing about a delayed shipment or an approaching demurrage charge drops by the hour. An executive dashboard is useful for planning and useless for this. To hold a process in control, the finding has to find the person.

So the delivery matters as much as the detection. A finding that lands in a report somebody opens on Thursday is a finding about something that has already cost money. FACE raises each finding as a named item in a queue a person works through, rather than as a line in a periodic report.

Take a container with a day of free time left at a congested terminal. The useful thing is not that the condition exists — a transport system report would say that — but that it arrives as one item, identified by container, with the free time terms it is measured against and the records behind it, in front of the coordinator who can move it. Once decided, it leaves the queue instead of reappearing every time somebody runs the report. That property is duller than real-time alerting, and it is the one that determines whether anything gets closed.

What is the Financial Case for Reading Every Charge?

The goal of the Control phase is predictability. The honest financial case for automated claims work is narrower than the usual one, and it has three parts.

First, some share of accessorial charges invoiced by carriers and forwarders is not supported by the operational record. That is well established in the trade, and it is why dispute functions exist at all. What that share is in your operation is unknown until somebody reads your own invoices against your own records. Any supplier quoting a recovery percentage before seeing your data is describing someone else’s invoices.

Second, the administrative load falls. The hours analysts and accounts payable clerks spend chasing gate receipts, decoding tariff schedules and emailing carrier representatives go down when the evidence is assembled for them. That time goes somewhere more useful, and disputes get raised while they are still in their window.

Third — and this is the part that is easiest to verify — you end up with a record. A programme that reads every charge leaves behind a per-carrier history of how often that carrier’s charges were unsupported. At the next renegotiation that history is evidence rather than recollection, and you have it whether or not any individual dispute was won.

Conclusion

The Control phase should not be where supply chain improvement goes to die. For Directors of Finance and Supply Chain Controllers, retrospective audits are no longer enough to hold a margin in a volatile freight market.

For improvements to stick, deviations have to be read as they are recorded rather than at month end. Runink FACE does the reading and the drafting. The filing, the short-pay and the carrier conversation stay with your people, because those are the parts that carry commercial consequences.

The first number to establish is your own: total accessorial spend last year, and what proportion of it anyone has ever checked against the contract. Contact Runink if it would help to work that out.

Sources

• Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) — Practitioner standards for sustaining DMAIC improvements in logistics operations
• Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) — Industry definitions for accessorial charges and freight audit practice
• Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) — Rules and guidance on demurrage and detention billing practice in ocean freight