Just as yourself, we do online shopping all the time. With all the convenience and time-saving, it also helps us to spare money or at least help me to understand how customers similar to ourselves rate the product we are after. Why wouldn’t freight forwarders efficiently measure or compare which rate levels they quote to their customers for FCL, LCL, AFR RFQ’s?
Rate level analysis with legacy tools is complicated and time consuming.
The sad truth is that often freight tendering is seen as cost center, rather than opportunity to gain volumes and negotiate (best paying) freight volumes. Accordingly, tender managers have to be extremely agile and competent in legacy tools such as Excel (we love Excel for that matter!). To make matters worse we have seen many situations where customers ask an RFQ to be returned by 31st of December and after pushing the "send" button discovered PIC is on holiday until 15th of January. Joking aside – the deadlines given for responding to bids are getting shorter and shorter. In situations where tender manager has 8 working days to run a complex tender through a global organization, smart employers should option not to depend merely on Excel skills of individuals.
Standardized tender process has long term benefits, some of which are hidden.
Freight forwarders have to be able to respond to RFQs with any format. Period. Yet, the process of responding to multi origin/destination RFQs has to be standardized and include clear format to support quality data and avoid over-communication. In the end of the day BL fee (Bill of Lading fee) at destination should be not built into OTHC or P/U fee, which would lead to hybrid costs that cannot be measured (at least not as apples to apples) nor properly implemented! Accordingly, tender process should be standardized to enable:
- Efficient rate level analysis
- Capturing of rate updates (between the pricing rounds)
- Efficient errors capturing
- Find and apply missing charges (late/missing internal responses)
- Transparent implementation (including what is billed by origin, by destination etc.)
- Common understanding of business rules and standardized T&C’s
- Optimized communication
- Automation (Integration of tender management module to internal systems via an API interface as an example)
- Revenue/scenario calculation
If you are interested in streamlining your internal tender process, one of the first steps to take is to standardize the format of your internal rate-card (for FCL, LCL or AFR). Sourcify’s rate-card will get you started (reach out to as at sourcify@sourcify.online in case you require a copy) and our advanced rate database will help you to make smarter business decisions based on facts, instead of gut feeling. We would be more than happy to show you a DEMO of our tool.
Sourcify is your neutral tender management solution provider for freight forwarders and NVOCC’s. All functionalities of our tool have been designed based on customers feedback to save time, reduce errors and bring transparency to freight tendering process to win or retain more cargo volume. Almost forgot - we also want to provide convenience to tender managers to attract more talent to the industry!
Happy tendering!
Your team at Sourcify