Rough Country is a leading manufacturer of aftermarket parts for trucks, SUVs, and UTVs, serving drivers who want to upgrade on- and off-road performance. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Dyersburg, TN, the company pioneered the direct‑to‑consumer model in its industry and offers a product portfolio that covers everything from performance suspension to cargo management products.
Patrick Just, CEO of Rough Country, leads one of the automotive aftermarket’s most advanced direct‑to‑consumer operations. But as the business scaled, the team outgrew their processes for managing shipping exceptions and carrier costs. For years, Patrick’s team filed lost package claims manually, with no automation to efficiently monitor guaranteed service failures and no reliable way to confirm that their work was being appropriately credited.
While manual filings worked in the company’s earlier days, they became unsustainable as shipping volume spiked. “It became a pretty substantial challenge,” Patrick explains. “Especially when we started shipping 10,000 to 15,000 parcel packages per day.”
Each of those packages could represent a potential billing error, a missed refund opportunity, or an unfiled damage claim. And when Rough Country caught recovery opportunities, the team tracked status updates and deadlines in disconnected spreadsheets and email threads. Despite diligent efforts, follow-ups could easily slip through the cracks.
At Rough Country’s shipping volume, those missed follow-ups translated into thousands of unpaid claims every month. The transportation team was juggling carrier portals, spreadsheets, and manual reminders to track deadlines and resubmissions, making it difficult to consistently recover every eligible dollar.
Without a dedicated in-house function, these time-consuming checkpoints made maximizing every single recovery opportunity nearly impossible. “If a claim was denied, we didn’t always have the time or resources to resubmit it,” Patrick explains.
At the same time, this hands-on approach made it difficult to enforce expertly negotiated contracts at scale. New accessorial charges and misaligned rate changes were often buried in line items across tens of thousands of monthly invoices. At that volume, small, per-package changes could quickly add up to significant recurring charges.
To combat these discrepancies, Patrick enlisted the help of an audit partner. But over time, he found the relationship lacking in responsiveness, speed, and data availability. Without transparent, auditable invoices and claim‑level visibility, Rough Country couldn’t trace the credits that were being claimed by the audit partner, creating a need to "audit the auditor.”
When Rough Country went through a change in ownership, the leadership looked for vendors to double-check their carrier contracts. That search eventually led them to ShipScience. When ShipScience centered the conversation on real opportunities instead of one-size-fits-all solutions, Patrick knew they were the right fit.
ShipScience kicked off onboarding by connecting directly to Rough Country’s carrier systems so the platform could ingest shipment and billing data automatically. “There wasn’t much of a learning curve at all,” Patrick says. “Their systems and processes are very efficient.”
With that foundation in place, ShipScience automatically identifies eligible lost and damaged shipments, tracks filing deadlines, gathers claim documentation, and routes claims and resubmissions through each carrier’s process.
As a result, Rough Country has moved away from file downloads, manual tracking, and portal‑by‑portal work. Patrick’s team now works from a single system that brings shipments, invoices, and claims together in one place. They have centralized visibility into submitted claims, claim status, and recovery outcomes, as well as clear reporting on success rates and payouts.
What was once a time‑intensive, manual process is now a structured, repeatable workflow that holds up at Rough Country’s shipping volume.
ShipScience’s analytics tools also give Rough Country a live view of carrier fees and changes over time. As soon as accessorial charges and published rates shift, the platform flags updates and highlights step changes in spending categories, so Patrick’s team can see potential issues before they become baked-in costs.
Finally, ShipScience closes the transparency gap left by prior partners. Patrick’s finance and operations teams can instantly access auditable invoices and claim‑level details. Every claim, status, and carrier outcome is now traceable back to a specific shipment, making ShipScience Rough Country’s system of record for parcel claims recovery.
Instead of relying on vendors for details, the team depends on ShipScience’s consistent, self‑serve reporting to understand claim status, spending, and recovery trends over time.
With these workflows and analytics in place, Rough Country no longer audits carrier performance reactively. Patrick’s philosophy is simple: “Carriers perform better when they know you're watching.”
With ShipScience, Rough Country can now treat claims and shipping costs as an always‑on, data‑driven function. And with continuous contract‑level recovery and carrier monitoring, the team has seen:
