AI Improves Pre-bill Audit Efficiency & Revenues for a Cargo Airline

This is our story of harnessing our cognitive data contextualization solution to automate Air Waybill (AWB) capture and verification for a leading cargo airline. By doing so, we successfully reduced post-billing disputes, and improved revenues and customer experience.

As we know…

The AWB is a crucial document containing vital information about international air cargo and freight billing. However, the intricacies of air cargo billing, influenced by multi-faceted pricing considerations, often lead to inconsistencies in invoicing. Manual processes, multiple handoffs and a lack of visibility impede billing capabilities, resulting in revenue leakages.

Thus, air bill automation assumes paramount importance. An AI / Machine Learning (ML)-powered system can radically and intelligently transform pre-billing audits, ensuring invoicing accuracy and mitigating post-billing disputes.

The challenge for the cargo airline was…

It confronted a labor-intensive and volume-based AWB pre-billing audit landscape, negatively impacting critical metrics such as revenue leakage, billing accuracy, turnaround time and customer experience. Approximately 1.1 million AWBs were audited manually, with a staggering post-billing adjustment rate of 6 percent. This high volume of post-billing adjustments not only caused discrepancies in reported revenues but also resulted in customer dissatisfaction.

Stepping in as a transformation partner…

WNS leveraged its cargo expertise to conduct a comprehensive diagnostic aligned with the best practices of the WNS Cargo Center of Excellence (CoE). The diagnostic process laid the foundation for designing a best-in-class audit approach.

Consequently, WNS’ comprehensive solution for the client encompassed a two-pronged approach:

Pre-billing Audit Proof of Concept (PoC): Based on the CoE and stratified sampling, WNS implemented a pre-billing audit PoC that successfully uncovered significant under-billing issues. Addressing these challenges involved re-engineering the pre-billing audit process and implementing a robust 360-degree data-to-insights design.

Cognitive Data Capture & Contextualization Solution: To further enhance the pre-billing audit process, WNS deployed a non-intrusive and AI / ML-powered data capture and contextualization solution from the WNS Air Cargo Optimized Solutions Suite (ACOSS). This solution extended the pre-billing audit coverage to 100 percent of cargo volume, effortlessly capturing inputs in multiple formats to generate automated AWBs while verifying and contextualizing data to provide accurate insights.

The seamless integration of the data capture and contextualization solution paved the way for…

The client to implement an automated and accurate pre-billing audit process, resulting in improved customer experience through on-time and First-time Right (FTR) billing. Tangible outcomes included: