Context
Compassion Canada partners with churches around the world to help raise children and their families from poverty. Canadian sponsors write monthly letters to encourage children to finish school, work hard and pursue their dreams. Letters and gifts are shipped to churches in 26 countries – from Africa and southern Asia to South and Central America. Ten large packages of marketing material are also shipped to churches across Canada every week to support fundraising efforts. As a registered charity committed to financial integrity, Compassion must keep operational costs low and provide exemplary service to its internal and external clients.
Challenges Encountered
Shippers were using different online carriers’ systems, each with its own address book, to process shipments. They tried to leverage large and steady volumes to keep costs low, but constantly changing carrier rates, update fees and occasional incorrect address fees undermined savings. Carriers wanted exclusivity to give the best rates and Compassion wanted guaranteed on-time deliveries to give exclusivity. Shipments weren’t always on time. Shippers could login to the various carrier sites to see when shipments were picked up, but couldn’t always confirm deliveries without time-consuming manual follow-up. Busy shippers sometimes forgot to attach shipments to the correct cost centre. There was no oversight or cost efficiency in a manual, time-consuming and inefficient shipping operation.
Strategies Employed
2Ship’s 2Ship solution has given Compassion’s shippers one centralized system and address book. In a few simple steps, shippers can now compare all services on one screen, verify addresses, print carrier-compliant labels, create manifests and customs paperwork and ship easily and confidently, regardless of which carrier is chosen. 2Ship was configured to enforce Compassion’s specific business rules, so shippers must assign a cost centre before a ship request can be completed. Training and live-chat support were provided in English, French and Spanish to get all shippers quickly up to speed with the easy-to-use system.
Outcome
Web-based 2Ship connects directly to carriers’ sites to automatically update rates and eliminate carriers’ update fees. Users get real-time tracking information to easily confirm they are receiving services paid for. Once a major international carrier learned that Compassion was using 2Ship’s multi-carrier platform, it offered to drop its rate 20% to get more business. Productivity is significantly enhanced with 2Ship and the charity now has complete oversight, reporting and auditing capabilities to streamline shipping operations, enforce business rules, eliminate user errors and address correction fees, track deliveries and flag invoice discrepancies.