If you thought revenue leakage happens only when you don’t bill or underbill your customers, you’re wrong! Today, with business operations getting so complex, revenue leakage is a growing concern across every stage of the manufacturing and fulfillment lifecycle. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss the main causes of revenue leakage in the shipping stage and throw light on how technology innovations like AI can help find and fix it. 

The Main Causes of Revenue Leakage in Shipping 

Despite the adoption of digital technologies, many organizations continue to lose a significant amount of revenue in the shipping stage. Let’s look at some of the leading causes of revenue leakage in shipping:

1. Damaged products: Damaged products, when shipped to customers, carry a high cost of customer dissatisfaction along with damage to brand reputation and name. Companies also have to spend a lot of money recalling these damaged products – unless, of course, they’ve been able to detect and locate them beforehand. 
2. Unproductive workforce: An inefficient or unproductive workforce is a common reason for revenue leakage in the shipping stage. Since low productivity directly translates into poor performance, it tends to push shipping deadlines and impact the overall profitability of the business. 
3. Theft: Cargo, when left unattended in truck stops, parking lots, or shipping bays, is highly vulnerable to theft. Besides, ransomware attacks are prevalent in the trucking, logistics, and freight industry. Such theft, whether physical or cyber, can lead to several losses for organizations. 
4. Poor visibility into freight operations: Another reason for revenue leakage in the shipping stage is poor visibility into freight. Without the right tools, organizations struggle to understand where their inventory is lying, where their trucks have reached, and what obstacles must be crossed to meet the required deadlines. 
5. Inaccurate pricing: Manual approaches to billing and invoicing also tend to result in massive inefficiencies, which can result in unnecessary costs in the long run. Poorly labeled serial numbers or incorrect barcodes can cause organizations to implement the wrong prices while also being liable to losses due to compliance issues. 

How AI Helps Find and Fix Revenue Leakage 

In an industry that has a million parts moving every single day, it is humanly impossible to keep an eye on everything. Manual approaches to tracking inventory, managing invoices, and shipping finished goods can take a toll on workforce productivity, leading to errors and undetected revenue leakage. 

To save costs, avoid customer churn, prevent product breaking, and increase overall operational efficiency, businesses need to embrace computer vision-based analytics. Such analytics inspires action, enabling companies to eliminate inefficiencies in the shipping process and boost operations. Here are the many ways in which AI helps find and fix revenue leakage: 

Detect Damage

AI can play a major role in reducing defects at this stage much before they are likely to surface. Through simplified barcode scanning, the technology can extract and analyze barcodes in visual data captured by CCTV or IP cameras and identify issues or faulty products – before they are shipped. Such preventive measures can help curb revenue leakage, ensure customer satisfaction, and safeguard brand reputation.  

Ensure Safety on Premises

In the shipping stage, the workforce is extremely prone to mishaps: from faulty equipment to vehicular accidents, poor packaging, misaligned heavy machinery, wrongly stacked parts, unattended objects, and more. These mishaps can risk worker safety and lead to revenue loss because of absenteeism. 

AI can help organizations enforce measures like boots, hard hats, etc., in areas with a high risk of injury. At the same time, thermal cameras can detect the exact location of workers, check compliance via hard hat detection, and alert them of possible risks. 

Prevent Theft

As elucidated above, theft in the shipping stage is a major reason for lost revenue. Using AI technology, companies can get a real-time view of their premises and thwart incidents of pilferage, misuse, or mischief. AI-enabled facial recognition technology can enable much-needed access control and also strengthen perimeter security so that only authorized personnel can enter and exit the site. 

Perform Predictive Maintenance

The machinery and equipment deployed at various critical places in the shipping stage need to work uninterrupted and unimpeded. Since any performance issue or downtime can cause entire processes to come to a standstill, AI can help perform much-needed predictive maintenance. The technology can monitor the movement of cargo vans, trailers, autonomous vehicles, and other machinery within the facility and detect issues – before they happen.  

Track Freight Usage

Overstocking or understocking of inventory also tends to cost organizations dearly. With AI, enterprises can effectively track freight usage, right from how much freight space is available and in what dimensions to how much can be made available during a production spike – in real-time.

Automate Timekeeping

AI-enabled facial recognition technology can help automate the timekeeping process, enabling companies to track the time employees spend on the job and accordingly calculate wages. Such accurate timekeeping and billing pave the way for better time management and ensure workers are paid based on the hours they have clocked in – thus restricting leakage. 

The Bottom Line

If you want to curb revenue leakage in the shipping stage, you need to embrace the capabilities of AI technology. At KamerAI, we offer end-to-end, extensible, scalable visual analytics solutions to eliminate inefficiencies and boost your operations. 

Contact us today to learn about our product line and the many ways in which we can help you enhance your revenue.