Runink FACE · Freight claims
This is a scenario for Runink FACE — the Fulfilment Autonomous Claims Engine. Claims are not a side feature here. They are the C in the product's name.
In Short
- The paperwork is gathered for you, and only the parts that are really there. The entry, the port, the reason it is held, the documents that are missing, the days it has been held and the per-day charge arrive in one place, joined to the shipment they belong to.
- Quantities are checked three ways. The purchase order, the invoice and the bill of lading are compared against each other, and where they disagree the finding names the pair and the size of the gap — bill of lading against order, bill of lading against invoice.
- The letter is drafted, not sent. A named person reads the case, edits or rejects it, and that sign-off is kept on the record. Nothing goes to the carrier before it.
Claims That Expire Quietly.
Most claims are not lost arguments. They are claims nobody had the morning to assemble, filed too late or never filed at all.
Where It Goes Wrong
One claim means finding the carrier's receipt, the quantity the terminal recorded, the rate that applied on the date, and the deadline the carrier works to. Then it means writing the letter. That is a morning's work, so only the largest claims get one.
The same is true at the port. An entry is held for a missing paper, and a daily charge starts running. The notice arrives with everything else from overnight, and by the time someone joins the hold to the invoice, the charge has been running for days.
None of this is about judgement. It is a gathering problem.
All of the evidence already exists in your systems. It sits in four of them, in four formats, and joining it up is the part nobody has time for.
Who This Is For
One gathering problem, arriving at three desks in three different forms.
- Claims operations. What lands today is a carrier record, a filing deadline and a morning of hunting for the rest, which is why only the largest events get a claim written at all. What changes is the start of the day. The queue is the cases your own records support, ranked, each one carrying the shipment, the documents and the quantity gap, with the letter already drafted for a reader to judge.
- Trade compliance. What lands today is a hold notice in the overnight pile, and the daily charge has been running for days by the time somebody joins the hold to the invoice. What changes is the timing and the completeness. The entry, the reason the terminal gave and the papers missing from the file arrive together, on the day the hold is recorded.
- Chief financial officer. What lands today is a demurrage line in the payables that nobody can trace back to a decision. What changes is what the figure means. The charge that was avoidable is shown apart from the duty that was owed whichever day the box moved, and each claim that goes out carries the name of the person who approved it.
What Happens Instead
Checks run against your own records, and the queue in the morning is what those records actually say, ranked, with the records attached — not a dashboard for you to go looking through. Connect nothing and the queue is empty: it never opens on worked examples dressed up as your lanes.
On the port side the arithmetic is the honest kind. The days the box has been held, multiplied by the per-day charge on the entry, and nothing else — the duty is deliberately left out of that figure, because the duty is owed whether the box moves today or in a week, and adding it would inflate the exposure by the value of a bill nobody avoided. What you are shown is the charge that was avoidable, which is a smaller and more useful number than the one most tools print.
A claim arrives already put together: the entry, the hold and its stated reason, the documents missing from the file, the quantity discrepancy if there is one, and a drafted letter. Your reviewer is left with one question, which is the only one worth their time — does this case hold?
Approving is what sends it. The response names each step that ran and any that could not, instead of reporting the whole action as done, so nobody finds out in three weeks that the filing never left. Later, why a claim was filed is answered from the record rather than from memory.
How You Will Know It Worked
Every figure below is yours, not ours. Write down where you stand today, because the baseline is gone for good the moment things improve.
- How many eligible claims you actually file. Take a quarter of the carrier records of what went wrong. Count the events you could have claimed for. Then count how many you filed, and whether each one was still inside the carrier's time limit.
- Days from event to filing. The same records, measured as a gap rather than a total.
- Demurrage and detention days. These are the daily charges for holding a container longer than the free time allowed. From terminal and carrier invoices, a full quarter by port, splitting the days caused by paperwork from the days caused by queues at the port.
- Days from event to somebody noticing. When each hold was recorded, against when a person first acted on it. Few teams have ever counted this gap. The rest depend on it.
Bring one lane or one carrier and a quarter of invoices.
The claim and the port hold above are drawn to show the shape of the work. They are not accounts of a customer engagement. This page carries no recovery rates, amounts recovered or customer names: a recovery rate from somebody else's lanes would tell you nothing about yours.
Questions A Claims Team Asks First
What it reads, who signs, and what the file shows a year later.