Cerasis
Yield Hard and Soft Cost Savings

When hiring third party logistics companies, shippers realize both hard and soft cost savings. Cerasis, founded in 1997, provides transportation management system and integrated freight management services which empowers its customers to realize savings faster and sustainably.

Cerasis’s web-based transportation management system, the Cerasis Rater, is used by transportation and logistics managers of its clients, its freight routing specialists, the account executives for pre-engagement freight invoice analysis, the client’s leadership and executives for business intelligence around freight data and freight shipment activity, as well as their own internal freight management services customer service reps to provide holistic freight logistics services to its customers. Cerasis Rater is a true lane based rating engine as it allows shippers to realize the best price and transit time based on their choice. It focuses on the management of less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping, with 95 percent of Cerasis business coming from LTL shipping.

In addition to this customer-centric transportation management system, Cerasis offers full support to its shippers for both inbound and outbound freight routing, its shippers’ vendors, and ultimately its shippers’ customers through dedicated and integrated freight management services. Cerasis provides supply chain visibility, empowering manufacturing and distribution executives with business intelligence (BI) and predictive analysis into their freight data and shipping activity that allows executives to manage risk and liability and to make business decisions to grow the business.

Cerasis technology and services includes negotiated freight rates that allows clients to negotiate freight rates in LTL (less than truckload), TL (truckload), and small package freight through the company’s carrier relations management services.

Cerasis continually improves the use and experience of the Cerasis Rater which reduces the cost of clients on technology. The company provides freight accounting so its customers could experience freight payment, freight auditing, and freight invoice consolidation services for better accounting, no matter how many locations they ship from.

Cerasis manages the entire freight claims process for its customers, from beginning to end, leveraging thousands of man hours of knowledge and troubleshooting, in order to reach resolutions quickly and efficiently. It also gives clients the ability to analyze their freight data so they can identify factors affecting their shipping costs, empowering them to optimize soft cost savings on freight spend.

The Cerasis logistics philosophy came from a customer-centric and a solutions standpoint. The company’s customers realize both hard and soft cost savings through its transportation management system and integrated freight management services. For instance, Plastiflex, a developer and manufacturer of host system solutions was facing substantial shipping cost due to the unique nature of their product, so they turned to Cerasis to find a cost-reduction solution. Cerasis’ customized web tools have not only resulted in cost savings but they have also substantially cut the amount of work Plastiflex has to do internally. It almost immediately cut customers service calls of Plastiflex in half because their customers were automatically sent an email, letting them know when the freight shipped, what was on the truck, and when it was scheduled to arrive.

“As our customers grow, and thus ship more freight, they often do not have to add additional resources to their freight and logistics departments as our freight logistics services scale right alongside them, thus increasing our customers’ overall profitability,” says Steve Ludvigson, President of Cerasis. The overarching goal since the founding of Cerasis was and still is to offer user friendly tools and services to manufacturers, distributors, and all shippers of freight.