Trax Technologies

Data and Policy Compliance In Freight

Updated 04-29-25

Key Takeaways

  • Most companies underuse their transportation tech—only 22% fully leverage it.

  • Data compliance = accurate, auditable, ready-for-analysis data.

  • Policy compliance = meeting internal standards and regulations.

  • Quality data improves accruals, cuts errors, and boosts profits.

  • Trax normalizes and centralizes data for better visibility and control.

  • Reliable metrics depend on reliable data—not the other way around.

  • Visibility isn’t a one-time win; it requires constant upkeep.

Many companies have little visibility into their transportation spend management data or perhaps assume the questionable or little data they have is as good as it gets. Only 22% of companies report fully utilizing their transportation management technologies in their supply chain activities (23% reported not using them at all). This is a staggering statistic, considering what a treasure trove data visibility is—the more you can see, the more you can control and improve. 

With the radical changes that we’ve seen in the supply chain industry recently, the need for consistent, reliable data in your supply chain management has never been more important. Data and policy compliance is the key to unlocking that treasure.

What is Data and Policy Compliance?

Receiving disparate data is the nature of the supply chain industry, whether due to the carrier’s output, the country of practice, the mode of transportation, or otherwise. To derive useful, quality analytics from this data, you need to set up data compliance rules. Data compliance is the practice of ensuring carrier data meets the requirements to audit, conduct accounting and financial processes, and produce reliable analytics and reporting. 

Data compliance enables you to obtain high-quality data that meets your needs. You don’t need to force data to fit your metrics. But this means you need to know which data you need, why, and what you’ll use it for. Only then can you set up your data compliance measures accordingly. However, the path to optimal data management doesn’t stop there, as you have to ensure policy compliance. 

Policy compliance is when a policy undergoes auditing to assess that it meets internal standards, regulatory requirements, or both. Monitoring and evaluating data and policy compliance is vital to ensure data purity and relevance, as unchallenged data degrades over time. This leads to basing your decisions on inaccuracies, which hurts your efficiencies, ROI, analytics, and potentially even the value delivered to customers.

At Trax, we believe in knowing which data is good and which is subpar in your data pool and understanding why the subpar data doesn’t comply with your standards. Then, you can remedy the root cause and build a pool of pure, quality data. Achieving data and policy compliance involves constant monitoring and evaluation and continuous process improvement.

Achieving Data Collection and Policy Compliance in Freight

Mastering data and policy compliance is no small feat. But you’ll be rewarded for your efforts, as it affects your entire supply chain management—reduces cost, increases overall efficiency, and delivers a competitive edge, to name a few of the benefits.

The journey of improvement and optimization reaches the pinnacle of performance, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, visibility, and market domination. And so was born the Trax Transportation Spend & Compliance Management Maturity Model.

Trax Transportation Spend & Compliance Management Maturity Model

The Trax Transportation Spend & Compliance Management Maturity Model is a framework that provides a roadmap for large, global enterprises to shift from a lack of visibility and control to a fully optimized and accurate data-based transportation supply chain—for all modes and geographies. 

  • Proactive—Companies respond to issues as they arrive and can eventually plan and anticipate matters ahead.
  • Optimizing—Accurate and high-quality data is obtained and assiduously analyzed. This offers companies better visibility and the ability to make informed decisions based on data rather than assumptions.
  • Leading—A company at this stage is fully capable of weathering significant challenges and using them to its advantage. These companies have aptitude, capabilities, visibility, control, and optimized operations. They become pioneers of the market, leading change and innovation while extensively growing their market share and simultaneously cutting costs.

Data and policy compliance play a critical role in the maturity model. A strong foundation for collecting and analyzing data is a launching pad for companies to rise to the summit of optimization. These companies have the aptitude, capabilities, visibility, and optimization to be leaders in the market.

They know exactly what data they want, where to get it, and how to use it to drive market change and innovation. Companies accomplish this all the while simultaneously cutting costs, increasing market share, and bolstering their bottom line. 

Here are some factors to consider to optimize your data management, data privacy, and policy compliance practices.

Use Accurate, Complete Data for Your Supply Chain

This one seems obvious. But it’s not uncommon for systems to contain data that hasn’t been previously used, verified, and validated. Data must be put to the test to be reliable. At Trax, we put your data to the test so you can be certain it’s reliable—we use, monitor, and identify gaps in data and work with the source to rectify any issues identified.

Data and policy compliance in freight requires a robust approach to data collection across the supply chain. While many logistics companies struggle with data visibility, implementing proper data compliance measures is essential for supply chain management. The supply chain industry faces unique challenges when it comes to data security and regulatory compliance. Global supply chains require careful attention to data quality and consistency, particularly when managing data across multiple transportation management systems. Companies in the supply chain industry must prioritize both data management and complete data integration to maintain their competitive edge and ensure informed decisions.

Data found in systems, such as ERP and transportation spend management systems, is usually considered reliable in certain instances—product costs, order management, shipping schedules, etc. It’s data that those systems are designed to collect.

However, when these systems try to calculate the final landed costs, estimates rather than actual invoiced costs enter the picture. Due to the nature of these systems, there’s no way to ensure that the estimates are even sound unless you're fully optimized through Transportation Spend & Compliance Management and can easily obtain accurate pricing data.

Once you have accurate data—or all of your systems feeding accurate data into another downstream system that normalizes, standardizes, aggregates, and augments that data, like a Transportation Spend & Compliance Management solution does—then you have the end-to-end visibility needed to reduce spend, regulate cash flow, and increase your profit. But, it requires a tenacious process for data collection, monitoring, management, communication, and resolution to reduce errors, if not eliminate them entirely.

Yet another important matter Trax tackles is actuals, accurately matching invoices and shipment records, identifying missing or insufficient data, and more to increase your accrual accuracy. It’s an additional data management component that we optimize and a crucial one in the supply chain.

For example, if your accrual takes into account even a few estimates where each actual varies by 10%, 30%, or even more, it can wreak havoc on your finances. And the reverse situation means you tie up funds that could be used to grow your company. Both situations are based on a lack of visibility. Such an instance is exactly what optimizing your data and policy compliance process can solve.

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Create Data Consistency

There’s no use in having good, complete data one month but not the next. Consistency is key to growth and prosperity. Constant monitoring, evaluation, and updating of data compliance is vital in maintaining an edge in an increasingly volatile market. 

This stability and constant influx of reliable data is a foundation to plan and build upon for future expansion. When you can be confident in your data quality, you can make business intelligent decisions that set you apart from the competition and position you for successful growth. Here’s an example of what that growth and prosperity could look like for a leader in supply chain 

During the hectic holiday season, when snap decisions must be made, leading logistics companies will have the visibility and reliable data to make informed decisions, course correct in the blink of an eye, and leverage any opportunities unseen to those in the market who are less optimized and prepared. 

Of course, the freight industry is filled with intricate policies, regulations, and practices that can impact data accuracy. Offering global services means you must remain abreast of changes to keep your streamlined processes in tip-top shape. 

That deep understanding is exactly what we excel in at Trax. We normalize services and charges to addresses, site names, and more. This normalization purifies your data—and helps you adjust to changes in policies or regulations rather than throw your company into chaos—so you have an unimpeded view of what’s going on and yet to come.

Centralize Your Data Security Management

Data normally flows in from various systems and sometimes disparate systems, such as ERPs, transportation management systems, warehouse management systems (WMS), and others. This hectic influx is overwhelming, as sifting through and constantly monitoring the data can prove quite the challenge if not done correctly.

For example, a company uses ERP and a transportation management system. The company also uses tech and other processes to manage events while shipments are in transit to stay updated on real-time issues, such as weather delays. This wide range of data sources can be tedious to manage manually. Trax’s system provides an elegantly simple and systematic way to integrate major systems.

Trax collects invoices and shipping documents to merge and evaluate data for field-level data compliance. This increases visibility and total control over the process, giving you confidence that you can accurately audit and process payments.

Know Your Regional (or Global) Compliance Regulations

Legal compliance is a complex but important matter. Noncompliance leads to losses in time and money, at a minimum. Knowing what you need for compliance is intricate and complicated, with regulations often changing. Add in the fact that compliance regulations vary vastly from one geographical location to another, and it becomes a major undertaking. 

For example, the EU has mandated field-level requirements, such as checking for missing or inaccurate fields in documentation, to determine if an invoice is compliant. Latin America requires registering a shipment before it goes out the door.

The more complex the supply chain is and the more variables there are, the bigger the risk of errors. This disparate landscape can be navigated through outsourcing to an expert in global transportation services who can centralize information and help you keep abreast of compliance regulation changes. Leveraging such expertise can decide between your company’s failure or success.

Trax investigates what’s mandated and what shippers need, as well as global events, to ensure that you’re neither jumping through unnecessary hoops nor falling short of meeting regulations. This is a small part of how we handle policy compliance to mitigate risk and increase efficiency.

Data Drives Design

Trying to force your data to meet your metrics is like forcing a peg into a square. It convolutes information, causes frustration, and doesn’t deliver good metrics. We’ve run into instances where a company doesn’t know it has poor data, thinks its mediocre data is as good as it gets, or wants to meet certain internal metrics and has to force data to meet those parameters. 

At Trax, we scrutinize the data that comes in and help you establish a plan for improving the data. Only then can you determine what business use cases the data supports. If you need a metric that the data doesn’t support, we help you get that data so you have what you need to make well-informed and business-savvy decisions. The cycle of evaluation and continuous improvement ensures that data drives design.

Create Data Visibility

In the supply chain, one of the biggest challenges with data compliance is visibility. But if there’s been little or no visibility before, it raises the question of how to build it. 

When maturing through the Trax Transportation Spend & Compliance Management Maturity Model, visibility skyrockets. At the data compliance stage, Trax aggregates end-of-period reporting information from various sources to create that visibility. We’ve mastered the techniques needed to build visibility from the ground up or out of chaos.

Improve Processes Constantly

Sustainability is key to success. You have to be able to adapt to changing circumstances and constant updates. For example, in Q2 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, some retailers saw a 97% or higher increase in online sales, which took a heavy toll on the supply chain industry. 

Your processes must have the flexibility and dynamics to instantly respond to the changing needs of the marketplace or even your own company. Such adaptability ensures that your company’s growth doesn’t halt. Optimizing policy compliance allows you to automate processes while maintaining that flexibility to remain competitive and profitable.

The Keys to Global Logistics Success

Data and policy compliance, although often underappreciated, is an important stepping stone in Transportation Spend & Compliance Management. To gain perfect data that feeds back into systems, reduce your spend, and more, you must have a rigorous process around data collection and other documents, monitoring, management, and communication, as well as the resolve to correct bad data.

Without quality data, you can’t make educated assumptions or rely on it in important conversations with carriers, delivery executives, and other key players in your supply chain.

Data and policy compliance can initially seem intense and complicated, but working through it with a global expert makes it simple, straightforward, and elegant. An expert partner like Trax can see what you don’t see to help you take your Transportation Spend & Compliance Management to the next level.

To know more about how Trax can help optimize your processes, increase visibility, grant you more control over your supply chain, and boost your bottom line, contact us today.