Company XYZ is a multi-national retail organization with retail stores across North America, Mexico, and Europe. The American arm of XYZ, XYZ America is looking to modernize their supply chain and logistics business lines and have better visibility of the transportation costs involved with supplying their 350 retail stores across America from their six regional distribution centers.

XYZ America deals with 80 transportation carriers that ship products from their vendors to XYZ America distribution centers (DC), then from the distribution centers to XYZ America stores.

Carriers are provided with a shipment tender that outlines some of the key information about a shipment:

• The direction If the shipment is going from a Vendor to a DC, or from a DC to a store.
• The distance the distance from the origin to the destination.
• The manifest what is being shipped (description, count, weight, etc.).
• The Load ID the unique identifier for the shipment.

Carriers invoice XYZ America for services rendered after a shipment is completed. The carriers typically invoice for a single shipment in a single invoice. Occasionally, some carriers submit invoices for multiple shipments at the same time.

A typical carrier invoice includes known charges, variable charges, and applicable taxes.

• Known charges are invoice charges that are known from the beginning of the shipment, such as fuel charge (determined from a weekly rate multiplied by the distance travelled), and linehaul rate for the shipment (an agreed upon set-rate between origin and destination). o There is a weekly fuel table that is published by a third-party national organization that indicates fuel rates for a given week.
• o Carriers establish their linehaul rates with XYZ America on a yearly basis.
• Variable charges are invoice charges such as waiting time (where a carriers driver has to wait at an XYZ America dock for the dock to be ready to use to offload their shipment). o If a waiting time charge is incurred by the carrier, the driver needs to obtain an authorization number from the XYZ America dock manger (at the DC or Store) to verify that the wait time charge is legitimate.
• o XYZ America has established a $15/hr wait time charge with all of its carriers.

Someone from a carriers Accounts Receivable department sends electronic invoices to XYZ Americas Accounts Payable department for transportation services rendered.

The XYZ America Accounts Payable team must then reconcile the carrier invoices against the shipments shipped by that carrier. All carriers have payment terms (example: pay within 60 days of receipt, else incur a 1% per month penalty).

The XYZ Accounts Payable team has a baseline invoice expectation for known charges, for each of the shipments, as the shipment tender informs the carrier about the following:

• The origin and destination of the shipment.
• The distance the carrier needs to drive for the delivery.