(…and how to fix them)

In Part 1, we explored how carriers can define the right price at the right time. But pricing doesn’t stop there. Even if you set the right price, hidden margin leaks can still erode your profits — unless your teams apply pricing consistently and performance is monitored in real time.
This is where governance and monitoring make the difference. They ensure your teams enforce pricing policies without exception, and that your customers deliver the profitability you expect.
1. Pricing Governance & Automation
- Manual workflows slow down your quote approvals, managing exceptions becomes chaotic and lead to inconsistent pricing.
- Billing misalignment: Discrepancies between tariffs and billing systems create claims, disputes that cost you time and customer trust.
- Misaligned incentives: When sales aren’t measured on profitability, they chase volume at all costs, eroding your margins.
If you recognize these issues in your own organization, you’re not alone — most carriers face them until they automate governance.
What Best-in-Class Carriers Do
- Automate workflows: enforce approval flows and provide consistent quotation guidance.
- Integrate billing systems: eliminate pricing errors that lead to costly claims.
- Use KPI dashboards: align teams around margin, not just volume.
How Open Pricer helps: Our platform enforces workflows, integrates tariffs with billing, and provides KPIs to monitor pricing performance. It was built to be highly adaptable. As Christian Marusczyk, Vice President of Global Pricing at DHL e-Commerce, states, “Complex pricing decisions are now taken more easily thanks to Open Pricer’s platform, accounting for seamless workflow and approval requirements as well as providing the right quotation guidance to ensure consistency with our price strategy.” (learn more on DHL e-Commerce’s success story). Additionally, Open Pricer’s software reduced quote approval delays from days to hours while cutting billing disputes — a win for both sales and finance.
2. Monitoring Customer Profitability
- No monitoring of commitments: Failing to monitor a customer’s performance against their volume commitments means you’re missing out on potential revenue from under-delivering volumes.
- Ignoring unprofitable customers: Quietly, some accounts may stop being profitable due to shifts in their shipping mix or market changes, silently eroding your overall margin.
- At-risk valuable customers not flagged: Failing to track at-risk accounts can lead to unexpected customer churn.
Customer contracts look good on paper. But without proper monitoring, volumes aren’t delivered, shipping mixes change, and some accounts silently become unprofitable. By the time you notice, it’s often too late.
What Best-in-Class Carriers Do
- Track commitments: continuously monitor that contracted volumes are delivered.
- Flag unprofitable and at risk accounts: Use dashboards to detect gaps in volume or product mix, flag unprofitable accounts for re-evaluation and track market risk exposure.
Open Pricer’s automated alerts and profitability dashboards provide a clear view of your customer portfolio. This proactive approach helps you recover millions by enforcing volume commitments and re-rating unprofitable accounts before they become a major problem (Learn more on Smart Contract). For instance, a leading European carrier recovered millions annually by enforcing contracted volumes with the help of Open Pricer — proving the importance of disciplined monitoring.
Your Next Steps to More Profit
Profitability isn’t just about cutting costs. It’s about transforming pricing into a strategic growth lever. Parcel and road freight carriers that embed governance and monitoring discipline systematically recover millions in hidden margin — year after year.
To secure and grow your profitability, you must take decisive action.
- Start by reviewing everything, conducting a thorough audit of your current pricing and contracts to identify hidden margin leaks.
- Next, invest in smart tools by empowering your teams with modern pricing excellence platforms. This isn’t just about software; it’s about providing the right resources and skills.
- From there, build a plan to create a clear strategy for dynamic, value-based pricing that adapts to market shifts.
- Finally, make it a priority to embed pricing discipline into your company culture, ensuring every decision is aligned with your profitability goals.
The time to act is now. Don’t let pricing mistakes silently drain your margins. With Open Pricer, carriers worldwide are enforcing discipline, automating governance, and unlocking profitability.
Book your strategy session with Open Pricer today.
Learn more on our latest pricing insights:
Read Pricing mistakes that make carriers lose margins Part 1
Read From cost cutting to value creation : How pricing systems protect carriers’ margins