Spend Management Experts Introduces Transportation Spend Optimization

ATLANTA, GA--(Marketwire - Feb 2, 2012) - Spend Management Experts, a proven global spend management consultancy, today announced its full suite of transportation spend optimization services. Delivered by the transportation industry's most experienced financial and pricing experts, these services help shippers eliminate carrier overspending across the supply chain.

Today's supply chain organizations -- including retailers, manufacturers, suppliers and distributors -- are facing rising transportation costs amidst economic instability. Despite lower fuel prices, carriers continue to raise rates, fuel surcharges and other accessorial charges. This combined with the complexity of carrier pricing, billing and discounting has led even the most sophisticated supply chain organizations to pay more than they should for transportation services. In today's business climate, shippers frequently overpay by as much as 20-30 percent.

Spend Management Experts (SME) offers a full suite of transportation spend optimization services to eliminate small parcel, freight, air and ocean carrier overspending. They include contract benchmarking and negotiation, network optimization, bill auditing and refund recovery, and freight payment. Each of these services play a key role in helping shippers achieve the following:

• Understand their unique shipping profile and characteristics,
• Analyze based on carriers' long run marginal cost,
• Determine fair margins on carrier services to justify fair pricing,
• Choose the right shipping methods with regards to specific shipping characteristics and market trends,
• Understand alternative choices.

Unlike other consultants in this area that rely purely on price benchmarking to deliver savings, SME uses a financial approach. By identifying a carrier's cost-to-serve, and combining it with up-to-date pricing data, SME is able to determine each carrier's margin and the savings available to the shipper. This is backed by the deep financial expertise of SME's transportation consultants. Each of SME's consultants has worked for major carriers like UPS and FedEx in a financial executive capacity, and most have helped develop the very same complex pricing models that lead to carrier overspending today.

"Carriers like UPS and FedEx are announcing unjustifiably high rate increases, while many shippers are still struggling to grow their business. SME offers an antidote to this situation. We understand how carriers achieve their margin and when that margin is out of line. It's a no-fail way to achieve large-scale cost reductions across the supply chain," said John Haber, President, Spend Management Experts.

To learn more about Spend Management Experts and its transportation spend optimization services, please visit www.spendmanagementexperts.com.

About Spend Management Experts
Spend Management Experts (SME) is a proven global spend management consulting company, with over a decade of experience in helping organizations streamline costs across their supply chains. By utilizing proprietary models, the most up to date market intelligence and complex strategies, SME drives significant profit enhancement for today's leading supply chain organizations. SME works with more than 100 companies including Barnes & Noble, Canon USA, Michaels Department Stores, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ferragamo, Lionsgate Media and Tumi.