JB Hunt uses fintech to accelerate customer onboarding, invoicing

New financial technology has helped the Lowell-based carrier JB Hunt Transport Services improve billing and bring on new customers faster, sometimes within a week, a company executive said.

In a recent FreightWaves webinar, Amy Horn, director of intermodal pricing for JB Hunt, discussed the new technology and other challenges, such as rising inflation, interest rates and fuel prices.

Horn said the warehouses are full of goods not in demand by consumers, and some of the company’s containers and trailers have been used for storage.

“This in turn creates additional administrative work on our part,” she said. “We have to monitor, bill and make efforts to collect some of the additional costs that come with these storage costs. Ultimately, we want our equipment to be liberated. We want our customers to be able to use it to move their freight.”

Meanwhile, fuel prices have stretched beyond existing contract levels, leading to extra administrative work to extend them for both the company and shippers, she said. Other challenges the company has faced have been recruitment challenges with office staff and drivers, but she said this is starting to improve.

Horn also discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic led some clients to move to more modern invoicing, including email and digital (EDI) invoices. She said this saved time and reduced costs. She added that the company also started using electronic proof of deliveries amid the pandemic.

“We recently partnered with US Bank to make the EDI invoicing process even better,” Horn said. “We were able to partner with US Bank with a product called You Send We Map, where as a carrier we can send all the data that any customer needs through a billing perspective, and US Bank from there has been able to take that data and send them to the customer as the customer needs them, which has allowed us to cut out the six to eight week delay and in some cases we’ve been able to onboard customers from an invoicing perspective through EDI within a week , which is a big win for us.”

Jeff Pape, general manager of transportation, corporate payment and treasury solutions for american banksaid the company is focusing on the following to encourage technology adoption: increasing visibility and transparency, improving working capital and the invoice process, and streamlining communications.

Horn said EDI invoices can typically be delivered in two days, and US Bank can help resolve any challenges with the invoices, including discrepancies between invoice and order. She noted that one of the challenges in EDI invoicing is when a batch fails, and this can affect hundreds of invoices, causing a delay of up to a day in finding the invoice that caused the problem.

She said the carrier is working with US Bank to offer API billing, and this type of billing only affects the invoice that caused the error, as opposed to the batch of invoices.

Within the US Bank platform, JB Hunt can receive payment on an invoice within three days of its upload and approval.

“The platform not only allows us to receive the money in a more timely manner, but we also have greater visibility into when funds are going to be received at JB Hunt,” Horn said. “It is an opportunity available to any carrier or shipper participating in the platform.”

Over the next few years, Pape said US Bank is expected to continue to develop API invoicing, digitization and do-it-yourself capabilities. He also noted the importance of reporting and analytics and said the company has invested in its analytics tools.