Online tools for spot and daily prices as standard in transport management - and why you are better than freight exchanges

The process of spot and daily price inquiries is generally known. Here companies place transport inquiries by email or phone with their own carriers. The forwarding agents then create transport offers using their own IT systems and send these to the senders by email. These in turn compare the offers - often with the help of Excel - and send freight orders back to a freight forwarder. This form of transport processing is very convenient for freight forwarders, since they can use their own IT systems and the processes that are optimal for them to prepare the offer. For the sender, on the other hand, the process described is very complex, since he manually obtains the transport offers, compares them, and issues transport orders based on them. Shippers are therefore also interested in using their own systems to help them manage their transport services efficiently.

Industrial companies and trading companies dealing with the transportation of goods and goods are increasingly asking themselves whether there is a better form of freight management for them. They want a central location where they can manage all of their transportation requests, transportation offers and transportation orders. If, like the freight forwarders, they use their own IT system for freight management, they can send freight requests to their freight forwarders digitally, who then submit a standardized transport offer instead of sending a PDF offer by email. Since on-premise solutions are often very expensive, companies increasingly use online freight management. There, communication with carriers and forwarders can be ideally bundled.

Freight forwarders and shippers often use freight exchanges. Transporters will find transport orders and senders there at low-cost transport companies. The term exchange comes from the fact that the transports are also assigned by action. As the term already indicates, the focus is on the transport costs instead of the operative freight handling. Many companies want to carry out transports as “cheaply” as possible. The quality of simple standard transport services often suffers as a result.

Transport software, on the other hand, digitizes manual processes with the focus on saving time, increasing transport costs and making better decisions possible. The communication between senders and their own forwarders is additionally structured. In addition, the transport software enables all data relating to freight inquiries, freight offers and freight orders to be managed in one system.

So far, the management of spot and daily prices, i.e. the management of individual transports, has been described. The management of freight rates, on the other hand, are prices that are incurred for a certain transport volume and within a specific period. In industry circles, these prices are often called rates, and getting such freight rates is called "get rates". However, other people also use the term "get rates" to obtain prices for individual transports, which can lead to misunderstandings. Unfortunately, some tools for managing freight rates do not include the management of individual transports. Tools for managing daily prices often do not include the management of freight rates.

If companies inquire individually about their transports from logistics partners, they usually achieve the optimal transport price for this period. However, transport prices can fluctuate depending on the size of the freight capacity on container ships and airplanes. If a company falls back on a fixed base of service providers, a high quality of the transports is ensured and there are no operational problems. If companies assign their entire transport volume to a freight forwarder for a certain period at fixed freight rates, the total transport costs for this period are also fixed. Which variant means lower transport costs for a company can only be finally answered after a certain period of time. Freight exchanges, on the other hand, focus on cheap transport and less on transport quality. Especially when you include indirect costs due to possible problems in transport processing, their cost advantage is more than questionable. In any case, thanks to their use, transport costs and transport quality are much less easy to calculate than when working with fixed carriers.