A couple of years ago we introduced you to Freightos in our post on how they were helping to bring freight into the modern era. Even today, when we are over half-way through the teens, many Procurement professionals, when they call up a forwarder for a spot quote, still have to wait two or three (or even eight) days for a response. It’s absurd. (See this hilarious video on The Great Freight Experiment.) And when the buyer has to get a shipment from Shanghai to San Francisco, which requires a truck, ocean freight, and another truck or a truck, air freight, and another truck, it’s a nightmare waiting for all the quotes to come in.
Freightos was founded to deal with this problem. In order to address this problem and speed up the freight quote time, on or off contract, in the global market place, Freightos was built as a technology platform that enables an on-line network of global freight forwarders to provide instant spot-rate and on-contract quotes for point-to-point global shipments when a (potential) customer needs them.
When a forwarder, or freight-forwarder / 3PL, signed up for the Freightos network, and uploaded their standard buy and sell rate tables for ocean, air, and land-based shipping for all of the routes they serviced, customers could access the forwarder’s portal on the Freight OS network and get almost instantaneous quotes for the route(s) of their choice. All the buyer had to do was specify the origin, the destination, some basic load characteristics, the desired pick-up date, the allowable modes, whether or not the load is hazardous, if insurance is required, if a customers brokerage is used, whether or not nearby ports / airports can be used, and click quote. Within seconds, the buyer could get the quickest delivery quote, the cheapest quote, and some alternate options from any forwarder that had a rate table in the system and chose to make it public. They could also request custom quotes from a forwarder as well, which they might want to do if they were willing to commit to a certain volume over a certain period of time.
Since it’s launch, Freightos, which primarily targeted freight forwarders and 3PLs, has been extending its platform and its target audience, now also serving (and targeting) enterprise shippers (in traditional logistics divisions) and e-commerce shippers as well. Since it’s initial launch, Freightos has added two major features:
- the marketplace
where all forwarders can list their public rates and any buyer can easily search public quotes (without a forwarder having to share quotes with them), compare, and book quotes - contract management
which permits a buying organization to upload all of their contracts, which are included in search results, if the route is covered, and allow a buyer to see their contracted rate vs. the market rates
As well as a few other valuable features for enterprise shippers that include:
- tariff management
that allows freight providers (including 3PLs and forwarders) to define all of the associated tariffs and buyers to include all the tariffs defined by their contracted routes - spend visibility
that allows enterprise shippers to see how much is being spent by lane, forwarder, region - business intelligence
that allows enterprise shippers to slice and dice the spend visibility and contract data - real-time multi-currency support
- powerful filtering
that allows an enterprise shipper to include or exclude forwarders, forwarders, transport modes (and specify ocean only or air only), select and deselect nearby ports, etc.
Freightos is a very powerful solution that will soon be Procurement’s best friend. How so? Stay tuned, as Freightos will be launching their Procurement portal early next year which will build on the powerful enterprise shipping portal they have now, but with features and functions targeted to make your life as a Procurement professional much easier when you are trying to build those total cost of ownership models during your multi quarter and multi-year sourcing events.