ATLANTA, GA. — The DDC Group, a provider of business process outsourcing to the LTL freight industry is extending its remote bill entry service to the truckload and 3PL sectors.

Over the past couple of years, the DDC Group’s well offsite bill entry process has been used by LTL trucking firms seeking to improve billing accuracy and customer satisfaction while reducing costs. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization’s critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications.

The DDC Group assigns a project manager to meet the management team at its trucking company customers. Working together, the team develops a phased migration strategy. The DDC Group installs image scanners with DDC software at designated carrier service centers and provides carriers with training onsite. The carrier prepares the bills for image scanning and feeds them through the scanner. The images created go immediately to a DDC secure FTP server in the US and are automatically downloaded by the system. The bills are processed offsite in real time by a highly trained group of experienced billers.

Scott Dobak, VP Sales & Marketing, Roadrunner Transportation stated that “the billing process is typically performed in the evening by shift and part-time workers located at individual carrier terminals throughout their networks. The repetitive nature of the job and the fact that the work is performed at night frequently results in employee turnover ratios of up to 50 percent. “

Reid Dove, President of AAA Cooper, added that “the billing process with most carriers is a combination of green screens, EDI transmissions, faxes and manually prepared bills. This approach is filled with potential failure points.”

“The DDC team knows that a bill of lading is a complex form, sometimes a long one. It must contain acceptable consignee, shipper and agent details, reconciled handling units and weights, trailer and pick-up details and more. The FPO service is not simply about remote data input but information integrity, form compliance, load analysis and coding, and exceptions processing,” commented Art Zipkin, FPO Services, The DDC Group.

“We have converted all of our 81 terminals to DDC’s remote bill entry and we are very happy with the results,” stated Reid Dove. Scott Dobak commented that “the level of re-rates went down and the level of billing accuracy went up.” Both companies were also able to achieve substantial cost savings that was particularly helpful as the recession took hold.

Savings can range up to 50% of pre-conversion costs, the company claims. For medium and large size enterprises, these savings can be in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Payback periods can be as short as several months.

The DDC Group’s remote bill entry service has been gaining acceptance with a number of North America’s leading LTL carriers. The list now includes Estes Express Lines, AAA Cooper Transportation and Roadrunner Transportation Services. The company will continue to offer its services to the LTL freight industry. It will also begin making these services available to truckload carriers and third party logistics providers that are seeking to improve billing accuracy and reduce costs.