A freight operation typically involves many processes, parts, and stakeholders working together to ensure the cargo gets to its destination under the right conditions. Ordinarily, managing all these can get complicated. However, technology, like in many parts of supply chain management, can be leveraged to ensure that operations are undertaken and goals are accomplished. One of the most common tech solutions for accomplishing this is digital freight management.
What is Digital Freight Management? Digital freight management is a technology solution that freight businesses, shippers, and freight forwarders leverage to streamline, coordinate, and manage the entire freight operation seamlessly.
Apart from its complicated nature, the average freight operation is time-consuming and will often need to burn many resources to succeed. With the digital freight management tool, freight businesses can reduce the length of operations by as much as 90% while ensuring a more efficient freight operation.
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How to Embrace Digitalization in Freight Forwarding Going from traditional to digital freight management can be uncomfortable, especially when the process is unknown to the business and people within the operations. However, digitizing the freight forwarding operation is necessary if companies hope to survive in the current freight market. Here are some tips on how to embrace digitalization in freight forwarding.
1. Invest in Relevant Technology Solutions Many processes in the traditional freight forwarding operation can be automated. Quote generation and rate management are good examples, including instant freight rate management . Integrating a Transportation Management System (TMS) into your digital transformation strategy can further streamline the end-to-end process of managing freight operations, from booking to billing. This system facilitates better route planning, freight audit and payment, carrier management, and real-time tracking of shipments. By leveraging a TMS, companies can optimize their shipping operations, reduce shipping costs, and improve overall service levels.
Investing in technology solutions that can automate many of these processes will help reduce the cost of operations and ensure the freight forwarding team can invest more time in more critical aspects of the business, such as building strong relationships with carriers.
2. Training and Education Investing solely in technology risks creating skill gaps if employees lack the necessary training to effectively use these tools. Therefore, it is essential to invest in training and educating the staff within freight forwarding operations, ensuring they can maximize the benefits offered by technological platforms.
3. Collaboration With Digital Partners It will be challenging to embrace digitalization in freight forwarding without partnering with suppliers digital freight marketplaces and carriers to access innovation and expand product offerings to clients. Now, freight forwarders can partner with international carriers without seeing them through many digital platforms.
4. Focus on Customer Experience Customer experience is one of the most important criteria used to judge the performance of a freight forwarding business . In embracing digitalization, it is critical for freight forwarders to ensure that these tools can help them meet customer expectations and enhance the overall customer experience. When that is not the case, then there will be no need to go ahead with the solution.
Processes That Can Be Digitized In Freight Management Most processes in a freight management operation can be digitized, with a compelling reason that it can save time and resources if appropriately transitioned. Here are some of these processes.
Rate Procurement: Using a digital freight rate management tool like Freightify can cut down rate acquisition from an average of 48 hours to less than 30 seconds.Rate Management: A rate management software can simplify the management of rates, including comparisons, analysis, margins, search and filter, and adding rates from external sources.Quotation: With templates, quotations can be generated in seconds, anywhere, anytime. And these rates can be sent to the clients who require them automatically through digital platforms or emails. Tracking: Traditional tracking in freight forwarding is challenging , and the updates are always quite behind, leaving many unanswered questions for clients.Documentation Processing: Poor documentation can lead to errors and increase the cost of freight operations. Some of this documentation includes bill of lading, accounts receivable, and customs brokerage. Digitizing them will eliminate these errors and ensure seamless processing of each of them.Logistics Management: Logistics and transportation operations can be digitized under freight management to ensure they run seamlessly. This can include trucking and routing management.Customer Management: Communication, bookings management, and other customer experiences in freight operations can be digitized and streamlined through customer portals.Digital Freight Forwarding Platforms To Streamline Digitalization Full-scale digital freight forwarding solutions can be leveraged to digitalize freight forwarding operations. These freight forwarding solutions come with functionalities such as rate procurement , rate management, quotation, tracking and tracing, and other features that help freight forwarders become more efficient and use fewer resources during the freight forwarding process.
Some of the best digital forwarding platforms are:
1. Flexport Flexport is a freight forwarding solution that coordinates global logistics from the factory to the customer’s door — empowering businesses to ship anywhere, sell everywhere, and grow faster. With the platform, freight forwarders have a comprehensive suite of freight forwarding services over multiple modes of transportation.
Some of its services include freight forwarding, drayage, freight management, and customs brokerage over ocean, air , and land. Flexport provides real-time tracking, online booking, and automated document management. All of these can be leveraged for a seamless and efficient shipping experience.
2. Sennder Sender is one of Europe's leading digital road freight forwarding solutions and promises to help its clients (shippers) save money and increase the earnings of its (carriers). The platform boasts a proprietary technology that allows for heightened transparency and flexibility across freight forwarding operations.
Sennder specializes in full truckload (FTL) shipments and uses machine learning algorithms to match shippers with carriers, optimize routes, and reduce transportation costs. Like many robust and powerful platforms, it offers real-time tracking and shipment management tools.
3. myCEVA myCEVA is a freight forwarding and logistics platform that provides end-to-end solutions across the entire freight forwarding operation, which helps simplify shipment management. It puts freight businesses in control of the entire situation while ensuring seamlessness and flexibility in the supply chains.
myCEVA is a freight forwarding platform that is part of the global logistics conglomerate CEVA Logistics. It provides an all-in-one solution for freight businesses, including quoting, booking, tracking, document management, and customs clearance.
The platform is user-friendly and comes equipped with features designed to simplify the shipping process for businesses of all sizes.
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Best Freight Rate Management Software For Digital Freight Management Freightify: Leader in Freight Management on G2 Freightify , a leader in the freight management category (according to G2 reviews), offers a robust freight forwarding platform that offers a holistic solution for freight forwarders to procure, manage, and quote freight prices (including all possible ancillary charges) in under 2 minutes. That is a big step considering that the same tasks could take the traditional freight forwarding several business days.
The platform provides immediate access to negotiated contract rates with carriers and real-time spot rates. Rate sheet automation features enable forwarders to easily and quickly add new rates through rate sheets uploads, authorizing agents to input rates or use APIs. This way, freight forwarders can acquire and consolidate rates on the platform and send quotations in minutes.
Freightify also easily integrates with your TMS and ERP to streamline rate management workflows and minimize errors and discrepancies. A freight forwarder using a homegrown TMS system can directly pull real-time freight rates from the Freight Rate API and apply them to shipments, without having to manually look up and input the rates. This saves time and reduces the risk of errors.
With the Freightify platform, freight forwarders enjoy seamless customer communication by providing a white-labeled customer portal that can be branded or customized as the freight business desires. The customer portal enhances the ability of freight businesses to provide customers with real-time updates on their shipments, thereby improving visibility and transparency across the board.
Frequently Asked Questions How does Freightify help digitalize freight forwarding? Freightify is a digital platform for managing freight by digitalizing different parts of the freight forwarding business. It does this by providing users with a singular platform where they can obtain and manage rates, create quotes, store and process paperwork, and improve visibility throughout the whole process.
How Can AI Help in the Digitalization of Freight Management? Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly transforming the freight forwarding industry. With AI, more freight forwarding solutions and platforms can automate tasks like real-time updates, document processing, and notification alerts to clients regarding the state of their shipments. By automating the documentation process, AI allows the platforms to reduce manual data entry and errors.
Other tasks that AI can automate are RFPs, analyzing carrier responses, and identifying the most cost-effective option. All of these impact the logistics or transportation process, leading to solutions like smart route planning that considers real-time traffic and weather data to minimize transportation times and fuel costs.
What does a digital freight forwarder do? A digital freight forwarder makes use of technological advancements to improve and optimize several facets of freight forwarding activities. These include carrier performance analysis, rate negotiations, rate acquisition and management, and margin addition. Freight forwarders will increase productivity, transparency, and teamwork across the supply chain by automating these activities, which will ultimately result in improved customer experience.
What does freight management do? It is the planning, coordinating, and executing logistics and transportation-related activities. These are the tasks related to transferring products along the supply chain. They cover things like choosing a carrier, organizing a route, tracking shipments, handling paperwork, and clearing customs.
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