How you can reduce logistics costs with "Quick Quotes" and "Online Quotes"

The promise of “digital” freight forwarders is promising: Calculate, book and reduce logistics costs online. These offers are known as “quick quotes” or “online quote”. In this process you also receive status updates for the shipment and can manage the entire transport in one portal - completely without paper and annoying manual activities. Indeed, new concepts in transportation handling have resulted in many changes in the freight market in recent years. This change means that logistics costs and shipping costs are increasingly comparable and companies can calculate and reduce these more easily. So far, the area of ​​shipping costs has been very intransparent for many companies.

Even the classic forwarders can no longer close their eyes to the development towards online portals. Among them, too, is the realization that they have to digitize their processes and offer "online quotes". The reasons for this are that, on the one hand, they want to remain competitive themselves and, on the other hand, because customers value digital solutions. For this reason, forwarding agents are now advertising their own online freight cost calculator under terms such as "quotation tool" or "get a quote online". They can also be used to calculate and book logistics costs, now online instead of analog. The most famous are certainly the DHL calculator, the KN Portal and e-logistics from Dachser. These classic freight forwarders are also turning into digital freight forwarders.

Shipping companies are also working intensively on digitizing their business processes. With "quick quotes", they enable companies and freight forwarders to calculate and book ocean freight logistics costs online. These are mainly container shipments, but also general cargo shipments. The online "quick quotes" of the shipping companies are particularly useful when companies need a reference price for individual shipments quickly.

As good as the options for calculating and booking logistics costs online may be, companies do not get a general overview of freight costs. You still have to obtain price information from various shipping companies and make it comparable in a manual process. In the extreme case, freight costs are called up online from the "quotation tools" and transferred to Excel documents by copying and pasting. In addition to the additional manual work, there is another problem, namely that the details of the "quotes" are usually not comparable. This shows that the maximum freight costs can be compared in total, while the individual items remain opaque. In each of these scenarios, companies still require a lot of manual effort to create a freight cost overview.

In addition to the lack of an overview of freight costs, there is another problem with the "online quote". The associated online process is very inefficient for companies, as will be described using an example. If a company wants to transport goods from place to place, they have to enter the corresponding shipment details in all "quotation tools" of the respective digital freight forwarder. This multiple entry takes place online, but it is also very time-consuming and prone to errors. So "online" is not automatically synonymous with "better quality". However, there is a way to calculate and book the logistics costs that eliminates the sources of error mentioned above.