Category Archives: Logistics

Need to Trade More Confidently? Maybe You Need Trademo to Monitor Your Supply Chain!

As you should be well aware by now (as we recently gave you a 10-part series on supply chain risk), supply chains are fraught with risks — that you need to manage, and that, in many cases you can only manage with visibility. In particular, multi-tier visibility down to the source raw material. You also need insight into key areas of regulatory compliance around H(T)S codes for trade (and ECCN for defense trade), sanctions and denied parties, and (known) forced/slave labour violations by any supplier in your multi-tier supply chain.

One application that can give you multi-tier visibility, detailed insight into key areas of compliance, supplier discovery, and even trade intelligence is Trademo. Centered around a global supply chain knowledge graph on over 5M buyer and supplier entities with over 100M relationships built upon public trade (import/export) data from over 140 countries, Trademo can provide unique multi-tier visibility and insight into your supply chain, and the supply chains of your competitors which can help you find potential suppliers who could also serve you and even identify other supplier locations that could be more relevant for you.

There are three main parts of the Trademo platform.

  1. Global Supply Chain Intelligence
  2. Supply Chain Visibility & Resilience
  3. Global Trade Compliance

We’ll discuss these in reverse order, as that is the typical order in which organizations generally seek out, implement, and use these solutions.

Trademo‘s Global Trade Compliance module supports an organization with

  • HS Tariff Search, Validation and Classification across 140+ countries
  • ECCN Search
  • Sanctions Screening across over 640 global sanctions list
  • (Import/Export) Controls (and Embargo) Search
  • Product Master
  • Landed Cost Calculator

HS (Code) Search is by country, trade direction (import or export), and partial code or product keyword. (HS codes could be classified either by referring to the built-in tariff tree structure or using the AI model to classify the HS Codes.) it brings up all the matching codes based on the product key word (or partial HS code), as well as the computed match relevance. You can then select the code of interest and see the associated tariffs and duties, controls, and any associated rulings.

ECCN search is similar to HS (Code) Search and is by country and ecn/ml number or keyword and brings up the relevant subcategories that you can dive into and get relevant details.

Sanctions screening can be ad-hoc, bulk, or advance. Adhoc allows a sourcing / supply chain professional to enter a person, company, or vessel name and screen against any set of sanction lists of interest (one, some, or all). Bulk allows the same, but against a list of uploaded persons, companies, and/or vessels. Advance screening is similar to adhoc, but allows the user to limit to countries, specific locations, and even set thresholds for partial match retrievals. The user can also setup blacklists, so that any attempt to associate a product in the master with a supplier that is blacklisted fails, any search on it returns its status, and any export includes the blacklist status. The user can also setup watchlists (for daily monitoring) and any time a new sanction, control, etc. is detected for the person, company, or vessel, an alert is created in the tool and sent to the user through e-mail.

Sanctions screening are against rules that define collections of sanction lists that are relevant to the user and the types of screenings they usually do. For example, if the organization only sources from and/or two 20 countries, they may not care about any sanctions or embargoes against the remaining countries for which sanctions and embargoes are encoded in the system. In the Trademo system, rules are sorted into list groups (global sanctions, PEP, OFAC, health & human service, banking & investments, enforcement, and maritime) and then sub-groups by source (country, entity, etc.). The buyer can select what interests them, a threshold for matching, define a rule name, and then easy peasy search just those lists going forward.

When a sanction is found, extremely detailed information is returned and generally includes the entity name, the list, the country, the authority, all known entity (operating) aliases, effective date, expiry date (if a limited embargo, for example), company address / vessel birth and identifiers / personage citizenship or address, etc. A user can also bring up the full citation and download everything in PDF if they desire.

Controls bring up, for an import country or ISO Code and/or export country and ISO Code and/or country of origin and ISO Code and/or a HS Code, all related controls and embargoes along with their type (such as import permit or export permit), the controlling authority, and the scope of the control. As with a sanction or HS code, the user can click into a control of interest and see the complete details and download the source (as a PDF) if they so desire.

The Product Master allows the organization to manage their product database down to a SKU level, along with all countries of import, export, and associated HS codes. This makes it easy for the platform to automatically monitor for relevant changes to HS/ECCN codes, duty rates, controls, embargoes, etc. and notify the user when these changes occur.

The Landed Cost Calculator is very useful for sourcing professionals as it allows them, for a lot, to enter some basic information and source unit and carrier costs and get a complete total landed cost based upon the HS / ECCN code and all import and export tariffs.

The user needs to simply enter:

  1. Country (of import, export, and origin), duties of interest (default, preferential, or both), and HS CODE
  2. Mode of transport, incoterm, currency, value (and, optionally, unit of measurement & total quantity)
  3. Freight, insurance, and any other known (sur)charges

The platform will then calculate the total landed cost that will include all the duties and tariffs on the lot, the known merchandise processing fees, the known vessel fees, the known port fees, and other known fees and give the user a total landed cost (where the user can see a 200K buy become a 250K or 300K or more buy and truly understand the cost of global sourcing). the user can also compare the landed cost across different sourcing markets.

Moving on to Trademo‘s Supply Chain Visibility & Resilience solution, it is essentially a supply chain mapping solution that allows an organization to see all of their 1 to n suppliers (3 by default, but more if they want) and filter into suppliers by tier, country, HS code, and associated trade lanes. They can create product groups by brand or region and just see the associated supply chains for those brands and regions as well. The default view shows them the supplier name, domicile country, HS codes supplied downstream, trade lanes used, tier 1 connection, and total shipment value. From this complete list, the user can select a subset of suppliers by country, HS code, and/or trade lane and see a graphical representation of their supply chain, augmented with trade value. It’s simple, but quickly informative and very useful to discovering just who is in your supply chain, as well as who is in a certain region / on a certain trade lane that was just impacted by a natural disaster or border shutdown and you need to react.

Finally, there is the foundational Global Supply Chain Intelligence intelligence offering (Trademo Intel) that is based on their core supply chain knowledge graph and all of the public trade data it incorporates. The entry point to Trademo Intel is the shipment search screen which allows the user to search across all bills of lading in all categories and retrieve all associated shipments, which can then be filtered by shipper details, consignee details, ports, cargo, and freight details, and see a summary, for the selected timeframe, of total shipments, total weight, and total value. They can then drill into (top) importers, exporters, and more detailed analytics. If the amount of data is overwhelming, they can limit to specific product categories, HS codes, shippers, or consignees before starting the search.

It’s a great tool for exploring your competitors’ supply chains, which, when limited to certain product (categories), allows you to discover potential suppliers you might not have known about otherwise. Furthermore, you can see the volumes they are capable of supplying globally and the trade lanes they are already navigating. While most risk solutions will give you credit, cyber, compliance, and/or sustainability risk, they don’t give you deep insights into products supplied, locations supplied from, lanes the supplier is using (which indicates which global regulations they comply with), and so on. When you click into an entity, you can see all of their trading partners, total shipments to/from each, HS Codes supplied, and associated shipments. They can then drill into any and all shipments of interest and see complete details. The analytics are super helpful in identifying the top HS codes, HS sections, modes of transport, and routes used by the entity.

It also allows an organization to keep tabs on global trade from a certain region and whether it is increasing or decreasing, which could signal tidal shifts that could affect future cargo availability, rates, and risks if there is over saturation or under saturation of a trade region predicted.

If you need global trade support around HS codes, sanctions or embargoes; supply chain visibility; and supplier discovery (and deep trade insight in this discovery), Trademo is a solution that should definitely be in your RFP short list. It’s easy to use, powerful, and already validated by a number of Global 3000 companies. Check it out and TRADE MOre confindently!

Source-to-Pay+ Part 6: (In) Transport Risk

In Part 1 we noted that Risk Management went much beyond Supplier Risk, and the primitive Supplier “Risk” Management application that is bundled in many S2P suites. Then, in Part 2, we noted that there are risks in every supply chain entity; with the people and materials used; and with the locales they operate in. In Part 3 we moved onto an overview of Corporate Risk, in Part 4 we took on Third Party Risk (in Part 4A and Part 4B), and then in Part 5 we laid the foundation for Supply Chain Risk (Generic).

As part of supply chain risk, we highlighted transport mapping and tracking as a key risk that the system should track, but noted that a generic supply chain risk management system would generally not be a full featured transport risk management system because such a system would also monitor and mitigate risks of goods in-transport. (Not just risks at nodes.) Such a system has a number of specific requirements beyond the basics outlined in our last article. In this article, we are going to discuss a number of those specific requirements.

Capability Description
Modal-Specific Support Cargo can travel by land, rail, sea, or air. As a result, an in-transport platform has to recognize each of these modes, the differences between them, the data that needs to be tracked, and the data that can be obtained from carriers providing each mode.

Such a platform should integrate with industry standard data feeds from TMS (Transport Management Systems), data feeds from major carriers, GPS systems, and other systems that provide data on your shipments, where they are, and when they are expected to get to the next location if the current leg of transport does not have a real-time GPS feed.

Cold Chain/Hazardous Not all cargo can travel dry at room temperature. Some has to travel wet, some has to travel refrigerated or frozen, and some has to travel with special precautions for hazardous materials. It’s critical that such a platform be able to tag items with these tags, these transport requirements, and assess the risks associated with the transport based on carrier, route, geolocation, etc.

Such a platform must be able to detect when a risk materializes or escalates, such as the delivery time estimate being pushed forward by a week when the cargo was only expected to have a shelf-life of six (6) days when delivered, extreme weather phenomena suddenly materializing in the region of the transport vehicle, or dangerous (man-made) accidents occurring as a result of a leak, accident, or failure in transport.

Manifests/Bills of Lading The system should be capable of accepting bills of lading and cargo / shipping manifests and ensuring that the bill of lading exactly matches the shipment that is expected from the supplier, the cargo/shipping manifest exactly matches the bill of lading, and the inventory at the dock/yard matches the cargo manifest. This is the only way to minimize the chance of theft and fraud during transport. And by fraud, we don’t just mean your goods disappearing, we mean your containers and your company being used to smuggle goods into one or more countries where the goods are prohibited in those countries.

The system should also be capable of identifying carriers who have had incidents in the past, the carriers who are most at risk due to the regions they operate in, and the carriers who are most at risk due to the products they are carrying, both for you and for others (based on public manifests).

Ports The system will track detailed information on the ports that are used in the supply network. It will maintain information on port capacities / throughput, the carriers that go in and out, the equipment, the security at the dockyards, and so on. It will maintain information on the labour situation (last strike, the date the contract ends, likelihood of a strike/slowdown, etc.) as well as the available workforce.

The system should be capable of tying in weather information, local geopolitical information, economic information, and other disruptions that could affect the port, as well as any other risk-based factors that are relevant.

Canals/Straits A lot of the world’s goods flow through canals (primarily the Panama and Suez) and straits to ports that are off of lakes and seas and not on the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. While there are the risks of natural disasters just as there are on the high seas, there are also the geopolitical risks associated with all of the countries that border the canal or strait. (Especially if they are unfriendly to the country of origin, destination, or registration of the ship.)

The system must track all of the risks specific to the canals and ports that the organization, and its carriers, use in the ocean-based transport of goods.

Warehouses/Cross-Docks Most goods procured by an organization will live in multiple warehouses in their journey through the supply chain. The suppliers, the shipper’s local cross-dock, the port warehouse, the railroad cross-dock, your primary warehouse, and the regional warehouses that supply your local retail centers or manufacturing plants, as appropriate. These docks all pose a security risk.

The system should support all of the third party risk capabilities that are relevant for the owner/operator of the warehouse, the locale the work force is in, the third parties that provide the workers, and any other risks that can be identified and monitored for.

In-Yard (Rail/Dock) Sometimes the goods are in a warehouse, and sometimes they are just in a yard at the dock or the (rail)yard waiting to be loaded on a truck or a train to be taken to a cross-dock or warehouse. The risk will be a blend of warehouse/cross-dock and port/rail risks, tailored to the relevant locale.

The system should support all of the associated third party risk capabilities that are relevant, and, as with the warehouse/cross-dock, support risks that can be identified and monitored for.

Airports/ Some goods will go by sea, some by rail, some by land, and some by air. Airports have their own class of risks — which can include hijackings, crashes, and way too many carriers and personnel in and out of shared warehouses.

Similar monitoring to in-yard, but expanded to meet the specific need of airports servicing your cargo.

Driver/Conductor/Captain The biggest risks in transport are often not the third party carriers you deal with, but the people — are they appropriately vetted, trained, certified, and monitored? Who are they associated with? Can those associates pose risks? Do they need to be monitored? If so, when and how?

This system should integrate with an employee/contractor certification and monitoring systems to at least make sure all employees/contractors assigned to the organization’s cargo have appropriate licenses, certifications, training, and insurance.

And, of course, an In-Transport Risk Management system will also need a host of generic analytics/planning/monitoring capabilities, but since many of these are common, and since stand alone risk-focussed analytics applications are also part of the plethora of offerings out there, instead of discussing these generic features in this and every other article, as we noted in our coverage of Corporate Risk, we will instead discuss these capabilities in an article dedicated to Risk Analytics and Monitoring.

Logility “Starboard”: The Real-Time What-If Supply Chain Network Modeller that Every Sourcing Professional Should Have

Now, it’s true that this blog is focussed on Source-to-Pay and it’s true that, as a result, we usually focus on Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization and occasionally on Logistics-focussed Models and Optimization Solutions, as that what’s typically needed for a Sourcing Professional to make the optimum buy, but this time we’re going to make an exception.

Why is network modelling an exception (besides the fact that, as we told you yesterday when we said Don’t Overlook the Network, it has the absolute best return on investment across all supply chain applications)? Well, if you think about classic network modelling, it’s not something a sourcing professional would do because it’s typically up to logistics and supply chain to maintain the network infrastructure that gets the product from the suppliers to the ports and warehouses and then to the distribution centres, retail facilities, and end consumers in drop-ship models. It’s up to logistics to re-evaluate the supporting network infrastructure on a bi/tri-annual basis and determine if warehouses should be added, relocated, or deleted (on lease end); if ports should be changed (to reduce overall costs due to port fees or local carrier costs or rail vs truck options); if new carriers should be considered; and so on.

The reason that this is typically only done on a bi/tri-annual basis is because it has traditionally been an arduous endeavour where you have to

  • build a very detailed model of all
    • the supplier production facilities, ports, warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturing/assembly centers, and retail facilities
    • the lanes used
    • the modes used for each lane
    • the carriers used for each mode / lane combination
    • the LTL and FTL rates for each carrier
    • the drop-ship rates for direct-to-consumer
  • identify all of the products being purchased and
    • associate them with the appropriate suppliers
    • associate them with the appropriate lanes, modes, and carriers
    • associate them with the appropriate warehouses
    • associate them with the appropriate retail locations or drop-ship locations
  • collect all of the current rates, for every supplier-carrier-lane-mode option in use
  • then solve a current-state optimization problem to determine baseline costs, times to serve, carbon emissions, etc.
  • identify all of the potential port and warehouse locations you could (also) use
  • identify all of the new lanes that would create
  • identify all of the additional carriers that could be used
  • collect quotes for every lane-carrier-mode combination from the potential new options that might actually be used
  • then build an extended model that includes all options and feed in all of the data
  • then solve a full-state model to determine baseline costs, times to serve, carbon emissions, etc.
  • then determine the ranges for the number of ports, warehouses, distribution centers, carriers, time to serve, carbon emissions, etc. that are acceptable
  • solve a copy of the restricted full-state model to determine a new baseline cost
  • then make and create copies of the model and run analysis against different objectives until the model is acceptable, and the costs (time to serve, emissions, etc.) reduced significantly enough to do a network transformation exercise

and this endeavour would typically take three to six months due to the fact it would take weeks to build the baseline models, months to collect the data, and weeks to build, solve, and analyze the models and come up with a new state that improved all the measures of interest as well as the implementation plan to make it happen.

But the problem with doing this bi/tri-annually is that you never know the impact of adding a new supplier or, more importantly, replacing a supplier of a significant product line or category where that supplier is in a completely different location, and possibly one that the last network design never took into account. Plus, the removal of a big supplier might cause a certain node (warehouse, distribution center, etc.) to be significantly under-utilized, resulting in unexpected overspend in certain parts of the distribution network.

But this knowledge is critically important to know before making a major sourcing decision that might change the supply base for a highly utilized product line or category — because the costs of the award will not be the expected costs. They will not be the unit or expected transportation costs used in the analysis that the award decision is based on, but will instead be those costs plus the fixed and variable losses incurred from underutilizing a sub-set of the network and/or overutilizing another sub-set of the network.

While this has always been the case, as the belief was that nothing could traditionally be done about it, if there was a tool that could

  • actively maintain the current network model
  • allow for copies to be created on the fly
  • allow for those copies to be easily modified, including
    • the addition or deletion of nodes (suppliers, ports, warehouses, distribution centers, retail locations, etc.)
    • the definition of new lanes
    • the the addition of carriers and/or carrier modes
    • updated costs for every lane
  • solve those copies quickly and accurately

then a sourcing professional could have deep insight into whether their cost models and assumptions are correct and logistics could update the network model, or at least the future state (if leases/contracts need to expire and new leases/contracts need to be signed), upon every award, and the overall sourcing, logistics, and supply chain costs.

And this is what you can do with Logility Network Optimization, formerly Starboard Solutions (acquired in 2022) and exactly why we are making an exception and covering them.

With the Logility Network Optimization Solution (which really should be called Logility Starboard, for reasons that will soon become clear), a Sourcing Professional can:

  • instantly see a graphical view of the current global network
  • bring up reports that summarize all of the key data
  • drill in to node / carrier / supplier / port / warehouse / distribution / product / combination costs
  • create a copy of the current network with all relevant data
  • and then create a what-if baseline scenario where they can
    • add whatever they wish (through simple pop-up interfaces they can add nodes and relationships),
    • remove whatever they wish (by simply clicking on a node or searching for the entity or relationship and deleting it), and, most importantly,
    • change whatever they want through in the network design through a simple drag-and-drop mechanism
  • they can then specify any constraints and goals, run an optimization, and see the new costs, and, most importantly, extract lanes / costs / variables of interest to populate into the TCO (total cost of ownership) calculations in their sourcing events

Logility Network Optimization can do this because it integrates with third party platforms and constantly extracts current market quotes and market rates for all major global lanes and can, when you change a design, automatically bring in those market rates and costs as a baseline for any lane / (generic) carrier / mode / volume combination you don’t already have a quote for. This not only provides a baseline rate (which might get better with a volume promise, negotiation, or current quote), but a statistically accurate one (especially if you just go with a generic carrier rate). (And, if there is no quote for a lane, the platform is smart enough to build one up from lane segments or tear one down using existing quotes and statistically significant costs per distance using statistically significant base rates for just securing the transportation mode.)

Furthermore, because it is a true multi-tenant cloud solution that uses a distributed “serverless” model that can decompose tasks into subtasks that can be run in (a massively) parallel (manner), such as data fetching, sub-model building, and even model solving (as all optimization models can be solved by solving sub-models on convex subspaces of the high-dimensional solution space), it can do it fast. And it’s just as accurate as the traditional, prior generation tools, at a speed that is breakneck in comparison, and that’s even if it uses statistically significant calculated data.

Moreover, it’s very easy to define multiple constraints and weighted objectives. You can guarantee maximum times to serve / times to deliver (subject to minimums that cannot be improved upon) while balancing overall cost and carbon footprint (through a weighted objective). (It’s quite easy to define objectives in the platform which have built in pop-ups to solve for different goals — service time, emissions limit, cost, and best X, where X is a single dimension or derived dimension that weights 2 or more other dimensions.) Or you can guarantee maximum times to serve, a fixed / x% carbon reduction, while minimizing overall cost. Or you can keep ports you know are stable and the warehouses with contracts you can’t break while allowing the delivery network architecture to shift to minimize overall costs.

The browser based interface to Logility’s platform offers a graphically represented virtual twin to an organization’s network with high-level summary data (products, facilities, lanes, suppliers, customers, activities, and costs) with easy scenario selection and easy definition and modification of scenarios. It’s very easy to dive into definition screens and see the suppliers, facilities, lanes, etc. and see/edit all of the data for any individual supplier, facility, lane, etc.; add a new instance, delete one, and see the associated costs, times, emissions, etc. and the underlying calculations associated with a node or relationship in the network graph (which is stored in a graph database that allows for massive scalability).

It’s also very easy to dynamically generate comparison reports between scenarios that compare (activity) costs (across cost types, such as leases, handling, transport costs, rail costs, ocean freight, tariffs, etc.), (average) service times (by supplier, product, lane, etc.), carbon (by carrier, lane, product, supplier, etc.), and other metrics of interest. Furthermore, when a user is happy with a scenario, they can one-click generate and output a complete comparison / summary report deck to PowerPoint for executive reporting (across as many scenarios as they like).

To enhance usability — which is quite obvious out-of-the-box to anyone who understands the basics of modelling, optimization, and decision analysis — Logility has an integrated quick-tour to get started, a full multi-media course on the platform and the modelling that can be done, playbooks for particular problems and challenges, and weekly office hours where users can ask Logility pros questions and get answers in real time. Logility Network Optimization was designed from the bottom up for usability and success.

Logility Network Optimization is the perfect complement to optimization-backed sourcing platforms with bill of material support. Buyers can model potential changes that would result from awarding to a new supplier, not awarding to an existing supplier, changing carriers or lanes, get expected transportation and tariff costs, augment the supplier quotes with this updated data in real-time through a Logility API feed (from an identified scenario), run a total cost of optimization scenario on the full set of bids augmented with accurate total cost of ownership data, make an award, push that award back to Logility Network Optimization which will update the network model in real time, create a new what-if, and see if the network model should be altered when the new supplier is brought fully on board. For the first time, an organization could have closed loop sourcing, logistics, and network optimization in real-time — a reality that was once as far away as the stars themselves (and why the platform takes you Starboard). It’s a powerful concept, and worth branching out beyond traditional Source-to-Pay providers and Strategic Sourcing Decision Optimization to achieve.

TenderEasy: Easy Breezy Beautiful Freight Quotes

First things first: if you are shipping globally, you need a(n) RFQ / Spot Bid solution built for freight. You may believe that just because you have a generic RFQ / e-Auction solution that can be used to collect freight quotes that you don’t need a custom freight tendering solution, but nothing could be further from the truth. When it comes to freight, at a minimum you have to consider:

  • five modes: road, rail, ocean, air, and small parcel,
  • multiple cargo types: dry, cold, frozen, and liquid,
  • palletized vs. non-palletized,
  • LTL vs FTL,
  • regular vs flammable vs hazardous, and
  • multiple cost tiers

and that’s quite a few data elements that most RFX tools are not setup to collect out of the box. Furthermore, even if the solution is highly configurable and can allow the creation of bid collection matrices that will collect all of the associated bid and lane data, chances are the platform isn’t setup with the rules to enforce the right bidding, the analytics for the right comparison, or enough sophistication in auto award scenario creation even for a baseline low-cost cherrypick scenario.

Furthermore, when you are shipping globally, you need to

  • understand approximate current lane costs / benchmarks,
  • know who is shipping in a region AND their typical capacity, and
  • be able to quickly access current rate agreements or spot-market bid rates

and your typical out-of-the-box RFX tool for indirect or direct sourcing is not going to do that.

However, a tool built by freight sourcing / logistics professionals for freight sourcing is going to do that and more. That’s what TenderEasy is. Founded almost two decades ago in 2004 to help organizations optimize their freight sourcing, they launched the first version of their fully SaaS-enabled freight tendering solution eleven years ago. Their freight tendering solution was among the first solutions that were custom built to help global companies manage their global fright RFQs across air, land, and sea. Since then, they have added spot quote capability, rate (contract) management, an integration API for custom data push to any TMS, ERP, or S2P system you want to transfer the awards to, out-of-the-box integrations with multiple TMS systems (e.g., Alpega, SAP4Hana), out-of-the-box APIs with public freight rate benchmark and analytics platforms (including Xeneta, Freightos, Upply, and Alpega FX), out-of-the-box integrations with container management platforms (including BuyCo), and out-of-the-box integrations with freight/lane-based emission calculators (including EcoTransIT World).

There are three main parts to the TenderEasy platform:

  • Administration
  • Buyer Interface
  • Supplier Interface

Administration

There are six main parts to the administration interface:

  • User Management: where you can manage your internal users with easy profile settings controlling visibility, accessibility and inter-activity with bidders
  • Supplier Management: where you can import, add and manage suppliers, including the ability to #tag supplier groups, and this management includes the management of (supplier) modes, cargo types, pallet capability, whether or not they do LTL or FTL, any certifications for flammable and hazardous materials, countries they can operate in, etc.
  • Currency Rates: where you can define, on project level, the currencies you support and the rates you wish to use for base conversion
  • Keyword Lists: where you can define as many arbitrary value lists as you want for bid and data collection during a tender (to make sure responses are with the right naming convention for rule creation and future data integration with your TMS, ERP, and/or S2P system)
  • Integrations: where you manage your export connectivity to whatever systems you want to push data to
  • Partners: where you select the data partners you wish to connect with for data enrichment of your analysis data (freight benchmarks, emissions, service KPIs, etc.). With some Partners you can “pay-as-you-go” via TenderEasy. Other partners will require a subscription and your partner license key credentials to access the data.

Supplier Interface

The supplier interface has four main parts and is designed to be as simple as possible for the suppliers:

  • Tender List which lists the tenders they are currently invited to and the status of those tenders
  • Tender Details where they enter their bids by lane
  • Import/Export where they can export the tender to Excel, fill it out in their favourite tool, and then import it
  • On-line bidding where Suppliers can fine-tune bids on-the-fly

Buyer Interface

There are four main parts to the buyer interface:

  • RFQ/Tendering which is where the multi-round magic happens (which we will dive into shortly)
  • Spot Quote Request where a buyer can empower their organization to execute quick spot requests for a single load in a transparent and compliant way
  • Rate Management where the buyer can store and manage their contracted rates in an auditable and sustainable way
  • Rate Search where the buyer’s stakeholders can search for contracted services and rates (that are stored in the system) in real-time, including historical rate records

The core is the tendering component where the buyers spend most of their time.

A tender can be created from an existing tender (as a copy) or from scratch. Creating a tender from scratch is quite easy:

  1. name it
  2. select a currency group and a default currency
  3. define the transport mode
  4. define the end time of the current round (with start [auto-]populated when you publish it)
  5. define the range for which supplier bids must be valid
  6. optionally upload any attachments with requirements
  7. optionally provide a detailed event description
  8. optionally define any terms and conditions (separate from the file uploads)
  9. create the bid / rate matrix by either
    • copying a matrix from a previous event
    • instantiating one from a best-practice template defined on system implementation
  10. add the suppliers (and you can easily upload their details via Excel)
  11. select/customize notifications
  12. publish

That’s it. Complex freight events can be instantiated in a matter of minutes. Why?

  • pre-defined best practise rate cards can be utilized, or you can copy a previous RFQ
  • pre-defined currency groups make currency definition one-click
  • the platform can store attachments in the platform, creating libraries for your standard specialized requirements, Ts&Cs, etc.
  • the buying organization can define matrices for every mode – region – good type / transport requirement they have on system implementation, including all of the validations and rules that are 100% compatible with Excel, with all of the appropriate lanes
  • the system will automatically select the suppliers associated with the mode and region with the necessary characteristics (hazardous certification, etc.) and all the buyer has to do is check the suppliers it wants to invite
  • there are ready-made automatic notifications in the system for every event you want to action

A key point to note is that TenderEasy supports full Excel capability within the platform, and easy wizard base definition of column and cell settings and properties. For example, each column can have a type, an associated validation rule, display/coloring properties, a visibility definition (buyer or supplier, read or write), etc. and each cell can have a more specific validation based

Another key point is that it’s stupid simple to import benchmark data into (private) columns in the matrix that you can use to evaluate bids (and, automatically, flag any that are too high or too low, possibly with colour coding in the column, or a separate column if you are using colour coding to show the percentage change in a bid from round to round. You simply select “import benchmark” and select the benchmark provider you want to use (which is typically the one you have a subscription with) and the quotes get sucked in automagically.

Bid analysis is also very easy. It’s simple to define a scenario that auto-selects the appropriate carrier and bid for each lane. There’s an integrated scenario builder where you simply define the grouping columns, the supplier group to consider, the tariffs to use, the (optional) adjustments to apply (where you can favour incumbents or innovative carriers and disfavour new carriers or eco-unfriendly carriers or low reliability carriers using a financial cost percentage adjustment or fixed cost modifier), and whether or not you want to use breakpoint optimization (where it will select the FTL amount when that is cheaper than the LTL amount at the current weight / space utilization).

Supplier feedback can also be customized and color coded in a multi-round tender to tell a supplier approximately how far off they are from being selected (e.g. < 10%, 10% to 20%, > 20%). You can generate feedback on any numerical value in the rate card, including service data, emissions, quality etc.

You can create as many (partial) bid analysis as you want, including baselines, using whatever rules you want, and then visualize them graphically in the dashboard, where you can also define thresholds to alert you if any carrier would get too little or too much business. You can also compare them side by side to help you identify the awards you want for each lane. When you figure out what you want, you can incrementally build (by combining partial awards from existing scenarios) the award scenario you want, push it into your external system for contracting, and lock it down as a set of rates to be included in the rate management part of the platform.

If you do need help (which won’t happen often as the platform is very usable, it is usually quite obvious what to do next, and all of the up-front setup on implementation jump-starts pretty much everything you will ever do), there is extensive help built into the platform, training material and self-testing, and a webinar archive.

There is pretty much everything you need out of the box to get going, with the only obvious exceptions being

  • combinatorial carrier optimization (once you have selected the preferred carriers) to balance cost, emissions, and/or delivery time (which they are currently investigating)
  • market-based alerts if a supplier you select is not likely to have current capacity (based on the spot market), if prices are going up quickly (and you should make lock in an award sooner rather than later), or if KPIs are dropping for current carriers (which are currently under investigation, with KPIs and improved benchmarks, which are needed at the foundation level, being investigated with Partners on how to best share this information pro-actively)

In other words, if you do global freight, and you don’t have a custom solution for freight RFQs and spot buys, you should not only have one but include TenderEasy on your shortlist. Once you see the capability a platform like TenderEasy can provide and how much more efficient and effective it can make your freight buyers, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. (Like any good e-Sourcing tool, it will quickly pay for itself many times over.)

Digging into Logistics Sustainability

In our article on Solving the Sustainability of the Supply Chain is Systematically Strenuous and Surprisingly Serpentine, we noted that while there are easy two-word answers for reconfiguring the global supply chain for greater supply chain assurance and more sustainability at the 30,000 foot level, when you dig into the details, it’s not so easy as you have dozens of facets to get right to truly optimize sustainability across:

  • Support
  • Sales
  • Logistics
  • Procurement
  • Manufacturing
  • Materials

Logistics sustainability is much more involved than just “green transportation” and using “zero emission*1 electric vehicles, because there’s a lot more to logistics than the plane, train, boat, or truck. There’s also the:

  • Packaging – is the packaging reusable, reclaimable, recyclable, or compostable; minimal?
  • Warehousing – are the warehouse operations sustainable?
  • Routing – is the routing designed to minimize unnecessary distance, handling, and environmental impact?

Let’s dive into each of these:

Packaging involves ensuring that the following are sustainable:

  • Materials as the only trace of us millions of years in the future — after the “right to be stupid” crowd manages to vote in the greedy, power-hungry, self-nominated populist con-artist candidate in enough first world countries*2 — will likely be microplastics*3 and plastic molecules which, even after millions of years, will never fully dissolve (and which are already so omnipresent that microplastics are even in all of our bodies now)
  • Manufacturing as the packaging needs to be manufactured just like the product
  • Logistics as the packaging has to be shipped to the product manufacturer
  • Packaging as the packaging needs to be packaged to be shipped to the product manufacturer

Warehousing involves ensuring that the following are sustainable:

  • Heating & Cooling since most warehouses are built super cheap (thin metal structures) and, thus, require ridiculous amount of carbon-based energy production*4 to heat or cool
  • Operations since warehouses use forklifts and robotic automation — which are not necessarily green, energy efficient, and/or well designed
  • Workforce since there needs to be a sufficient workforce and there needs to be training in place to make sure they workforce is suitably skilled for the job

Routing involves ensuring that the following are sustainable:

  • Transportation Modes as most international shipments are multi-modal (and involve at least two different means of transportation, and usually three)
  • Cross-Docking as shipments will need to be unloaded from ships and trains at ports and yards and loaded onto trucks and unloaded from big trucks onto smaller trucks at local depots
  • Leg-Routings as ships can’t disrupt whale schools, dolphin pods, or fish colonies (which might also be needed for food); planes shouldn’t fly low through wildlife/bird reserves; trains shouldn’t pollute the forests they run through; etc.

In other words, there’s a lot more to logistics sustainability than green transportation, which isn’t exactly green to begin with!

*“Green” vehicles aren’t anywhere close to zero emission when you consider all of the emissions created in the production of those electric vehicles and those battery packs! For example, as quoted on the MIT Climate Portal, building the 82 kWh lithium-ion battery found in a Tesla Model 3 creates between 2.5 and 16 metric tons of CO2 (exactly how much depends greatly on what energy source is used to do the heating). This intensive battery manufacturing means that building a new EV can produce around 80% more emissions than building a comparable gas-powered car. And then you have to consider all of the emissions produced by your energy provider to produce the electricity that recharges your battery pack every few hundred kilometers (or 0.6214 miles for you Americans). If your local power plant is still burning dirty coal, then you could be responsible for the creation of 950 grams of CO2 per kWH. So if you’re driving a new AWD Performance Tesla, you’re producing 77.9 kg of CO2 for every 567 km you drive. In comparison, if you’re driving a Toyota Yaris that gives you an average of 36 mpg, or 58 kpg, you’re burning 9.78 gallons and producing roughly 86.9 kg of CO2 for the same 567 km. In other words, you’re only about 10% more green on a per-tank basis driving that Tesla 3 if your local power provider burns dirty coal!

In other words, “green” transportation isn’t necessarily green if you don’t consider the energy product or the up-front production. If the battery production emits 16,000 kgs of CO2, all other vehicle production related emissions are equal, and you are using electricity produced from dirty coal to charge the battery, you don’t see the first drop of CO2 savings until you drive almost 1,780 tanks or 1,000,000 kms! And then you only see a 10% if, and only if, as stated above, the production of the remainder of the vehicle has about the same CO2 production as an average vehicle for its size.  (Which means, at the end of those warrantied 192,000 kms, that green Tesla won’t even be Carbon Neutral!  It won’t even be one fifth of the way!)

*2 greedy, power-hungry con-artists who will repeal all environmental laws, take away all our basic human rights, and even start wars that could not only end all wars but end us (assuming the AI they are using to replace us doesn’t end us first)

*3 after the last last satellite has plummeted back to earth (and burned up), the last skyscraper has crumbled, and the last pyramid has turned to dust, traces of certain microplastic molecules that do not occur naturally in nature will still be found in the soils and at the bottom of the ocean where there are no lifeforms to break them down

*4 even renewable energy such as solar, wind, and hydro has a carbon footprint as the panels need to be manufactured, the turbines need to be manufactured, and the dams need to be built and all that involves carbon production with today’s technology