If you run a trucking or freight business in Australia, you’ve probably heard plenty of people talk about outsourcing the back office. The problem is that they don’t always explain what that actually means for your day-to-day operation.
The reality is simple. An offshore back-office team can take a significant amount of paperwork and administrative work off your team. But it shouldn’t replace the people making real-time operational decisions.
Knowing where that line is matters.
What a back-office team can realistically handle
A lot of the administrative work in a transport business is repetitive, document-heavy and time-sensitive. This is the type of work that can be handled well by an offshore back-office team.
POD and docket processing
Your back-office team can match proof-of-delivery paperwork to jobs, follow up on missing PODs and keep records organised so invoicing isn’t held up waiting for paperwork.
Freight invoice reconciliation
Invoices can be checked against rate agreements and job records, with discrepancies flagged before they turn into bigger problems.
Booking and order administration
This can include data entry, confirmations and following up on the paperwork connected to bookings. It helps free up the people currently trying to manage these tasks alongside everything else.
NHVAS and BFM record-keeping
An offshore team can help keep fatigue and maintenance records current and organised ahead of an audit. They support the administrative side of the record-keeping, not the accreditation decisions themselves.
Customer service overflow
Routine status enquiries can be handled by the back-office team so your operational staff aren’t constantly interrupted by calls asking where a shipment is.
What a back-office team shouldn’t be doing
There are some responsibilities that should stay with the people who know your fleet, drivers, routes and daily operations.
Dispatch decisions, driver allocation and situations that require real-time operational judgement are examples of this.
A back-office team working from documents and data doesn’t have the same situational context as someone managing the operation directly. Handing over those decisions would mean giving the team responsibility for something the arrangement wasn’t designed to handle.
How the arrangement can work
A practical arrangement doesn’t mean handing your entire operation to an offshore team.
Your Australian team can continue managing dispatch, drivers, customers and operational decisions. The offshore back-office team can handle the administrative work in the background, including POD follow-up, job documentation, invoice checks, booking administration and other repetitive paperwork.
The aim should be to support the way your business already operates. You shouldn’t have to completely change your workflow just to make outsourcing work. A good back-office team should be able to work within your existing processes and systems wherever possible.
The real benefit of offshore back-office support
Offshore support isn’t a magic solution to every problem in a transport business.
The benefit is more straightforward. It takes repetitive, document-driven work off your team’s plate at a lower cost than employing someone locally for the same administrative tasks.
That gives the people who understand your operation more time to focus on work that requires their knowledge and judgement.
At Maximus BPO, we look at the work your team is already doing and identify which administrative tasks can realistically be handled by an offshore back-office team. The best place to start is usually with the tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming and taking your operational staff away from their core responsibilities.