IPS Worldwide
Data Analytics for better Logistics Practices

IPS Worldwide is not a typical run of the mill third-party logistics company. It concentrates primarily on Freight Audit and Payments and helps organizations mine their data, which it turns into information and analytics, in order for clients to make better strategic decisions. We speak to William Davies, President of IPS Worldwide on how the company provides data to clients to provide insights into logistics data and help them cut costs.

What are some of the challenges IPS Worldwide sees in the logistics services space and how will you leverage them?

One of the biggest challenges is data mining and gathering that data for organizations to capture all their spend in one place, and that is one of the advantages of IPS Worldwide. Instead of a company having to pay their freight invoices internally through their Accounts payable (AP) department only to get very high-level information, such as who they are paying and how much, IPS captures all the individual and specific information from each freight bill that comes in. This gives our customers a good idea of their transportation expenditures, where it is being spent, with which carriers and the modes of transportation they are spending on. With the relevant data, it is possible to perform different analytics like cost-saving analysis, network mapping analysis of a distribution network and others.

The other challenge that organizations face is getting all their data in one place. Most major corporations have locations around the world and getting all that data to a centralized location is difficult. Another is finding the capacity for all the modes of transportation that the organizations deal with. By having all the data that relates a particular company, we give them information to go out and secure additional capacity to assist them in times of tight capacity in the marketplace.

What are the divisions of IPS Worldwide?

The mothership of our whole organization is the Freight Audit and Payment division. That is where we pay different companies’ freight bills and capture all of their data. We also have another division called the Logistics/Carrier Contract Management division. Here, we help customers negotiate transportation contracts and pricing while helping them with analytics. We also set them up with a transportation management system as well as back-office transportation solutions—monthly reporting, contract management, freight claims management, transportation management system (TMS) implementation and management, and post-audit claims management.

The third division is the IPS analytics division; this is where we have logistics engineers looking at different companies’ data, which gets turned into usable information for use in network optimization and further cost reduction opportunities. We have a brokerage division under Landstar, and that helps with the day-to-day operations of finding capacity for customers and covering different loads that customers have on a daily basis. From an international perspective, we’ve got a division called ExFreight, just like Landstar, but for the international market.

Tell us about an instance where your solutions came to the aid of a customer.

We’ve had a couple of major customers who have come to us and have asked us to gather all of their information to provide them with further insights and analysis on their freight costs. We were able to take a look at what they are doing within their system, and we realized that they had different contracts with different carriers for the same mode of transportation. However, they were all of varying pricing and tariffs, and had different rules and accessorials. The organization of contracts and their management was all over the place. We helped them put it all into a central database and assisted them when negotiating the contract and the roles and accessorial tariff to help them reduce their cost. We had one customer that had a $23 million Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) spending, and we helped them lessen that expenditure by about $5.3 million. The savings that we capture for customers is anywhere between 18 and 33 percent.

What gives IPS Worldwide a competitive edge over the competition?’

I would say our IT is probably the best there is out there in the freight and audit payment industry due to the different divisions that we have and the fact that we are a global organization. There isn’t any other freight and logistics company that is truly global from a freight audit and payment perspective. We have our employees in our own offices; we don’t outsource that to anybody else. We do that within our organization.

What does the future look like for IPS Worldwide?

We’re always expanding in locations throughout the world; we’re going to places where new clients are. We’re mainly looking to expand into the Middle East and Australia. As far as the future, we are always a step ahead of everyone else in terms of our technology and our outlook, where the market is going and how the industry operates. We are very flexible; we are a customized company with our technology.