Cerapedics is a global, commercial-stage ortho-biologics company that aspires to transform the standard of care for bone repair. The company’s mission is to develop solutions that aid in healing bones faster and at higher rates, without compromising safety, so that patients can live their healthiest lives. 
Bone grafts, including Cerapedics’ products, are used in over four million annual spine, orthopedics, trauma and interventional procedures world-wide. Cerapedics’ i-FACTOR product is FDA PMA approved for cervical use in the United States.
Cerapedics manages both the manufacturing and distribution of its products to customers across the globe. In order to keep shipping expenses manageable, while still maintaining the high quality of service its customers depend upon, its team must pay close attention to the agreements it makes with shipping carriers. Pricing and service agreements must be closely monitored to ensure that any refunds and rebates are delivered as promised.
As its business continued to grow, the company often found itself spending a great deal of time and manpower downloading shipping reports and reviewing them line by line to ensure that the company was receiving every benefit it had negotiated for itself. The carriers it had contracts with did not freely provide information about how to optimize their agreement, meaning its team had to essentially dig for each dollar.
It soon realized how inefficient its process was, and was afraid that it was missing potential savings. It was time for a change.
Shipping Intelligence to the Rescue
Cerapedics turned to Reveel, provider of the industry’s only Shipping Intelligence Platform, to gain a better understanding of its carrier agreements and to ensure every aspect of its contracts were reviewed for unnecessary spending, hidden in the massive amounts of data.
“Before Reveel, it was a very ugly, painful and time-consuming process. It often took a full day to download the data, and even longer to set it up in Excel. That often meant we were taking work home at night, or over the weekend,” said Matt Reece, the Senior Manager of Logistics and Safety at Cerapedics. “Since moving to their platform, it takes minutes, not days, to get the data we need. We’ve been able to easily review on a weekly basis whether we were hitting our targets, being compensated correctly by our carrier, and if everything was running according to plan. It’s been a huge difference-maker in terms of the information our team has at its fingertips – not to mention the hours we’ve all gotten back in our days.”
The Reveel Shipping Intelligence Platform is a professional shipping and logistics intelligence platform that uses machine learning to transform complex shipping data into simple ways to save money. The platform lets customers use their unique shipping data to accurately see the cost impact of discount and surcharge changes, helping them improve shipping decisions.
Reveel actively monitors carrier agreements for shippers, ensuring that no discounts are missed. In addition, the platform examines a shipper’s operations against several key shipping success factors to help customers understand where they’re doing well – and where there’s room for improvement. From there, specific advice and recommendations are given to help the shipper improve operational efficiency and lower costs. Simply put, Reveel helps shippers level the playing field with the big two carriers.
The manual tracking of what was delivered on time, what was delivered late, and other items such as damage or wrong address issues was eliminated. Productivity was greatly improved. “The amount we’ve recovered in overlooked or missed credits and adjustments alone is worth the cost of the platform,” added Reece.
Agreement Comparison
One of the other key features of the platform for Cerapedics was its ability to review an organization’s current shipping contract against what other carriers were offering. Traditionally, carriers purposefully make the verbiage in contracts unclear, difficult and time-consuming to decipher. This leads many organizations to never dive deep into the details of their own contracts, or to investigate whether making a change would be advantageous.
With Reveel, this comparison process could be done automatically, highlighting any differences in cost or service levels. By making this information readily available, Cerapedics could see what each carrier was offering and make an informed decision on their annual carrier spend.
“Using Reveel’s Agreement Comparison functionality to examine potential contracts, we were able to make the strategic decision to change carriers to UPS,” said Reece. “Without the platform, we would have needed to hire an additional resource to conduct the comparison.”
Simple, Yet Powerful Reporting
In addition to reviewing its shipping spend on a weekly basis, the Cerapedics team was responsible for reporting status updates to the executive team on a regular basis. In the past, simply getting the information needed for this report was a time consuming and wasteful process.
With Reveel, Cerapedics could easily report on shipping spending and whether they had hit their intended targets. Information on types of packages being sent, and where, and how much each cost, helped the company leadership make better, more strategic business decisions. Because of the availability of accurate shipping data, informed decisions about everything from the company’s product offering to where its stock should be physically located could be made, helping them optimize their logistics and shipping spend.
Agreement Monitoring Leads to Savings
As a part of the agreement monitoring function of the Reveel platform, current shipping spend is monitored on an ongoing basis. This process not only looks into whether there are discounts or rebates being missed, but it reviews the details around how packages are sent and looks for potential ways to improve cost savings. In reviewing Cerapedics’ shipping spend, the platform identified an issue with Early A.M. shipping.
Cerapedics was shipping a larger-than-average amount of its merchandise via the “Early A.M.” shipping category, which guaranteed that packages would arrive by 8 am local time the next day. There were definitely some instances where that designation was urgent, but for the most part it seemed to be an action customer service was taking to please customers when there was an issue. For non-urgent matters, simply moving down a level to next day/morning shipping saved thousands of dollars for Cerapedics, without impacting the excellent customer service the company was known for.
“The platform identified an area where we were unnecessarily wasting money and told us exactly how to fix it,” said Reece. “We would never have identified this issue without Reveel.”
About Reveel
Reveel is the leading Shipping Intelligence™ Platform that enables companies to level the playing field with FedEx and UPS. With over 15 years of parcel agreement management expertise and $200M+ in savings for its clients, the company provides actionable insights to help customers make smarter business decisions and have peace of mind. Reveel helps shippers leverage the power of data science to capture significant ROI and improve their competitive advantage.
