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 called “quick quotes” or “online quote”. In this process, you also receive status updates on the shipment and can manage the entire transport in one portal – completely without paper and tedious manual activities. In fact, new concepts of transport processing have led to many changes in the freight market in recent years. This change means that logistics costs and freight forwarding costs are becoming increasingly comparable and companies can calculate and reduce them more easily. Until now, the area of ​​freight forwarding costs was very opaque for many companies.

Even traditional freight forwarders can no longer turn a blind eye to the development of online portals. They are also realizing that they need to digitize their processes and offer “online quotes.” The reasons for this are, on the one hand, that they want to remain competitive themselves and, on the other hand, that customers value digital solutions. Freight forwarders are therefore now advertising their own online freight cost calculators 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 best known are certainly the DHL calculator, the KN portal and e-logistics from Dachser. These traditional freight forwarders are also transforming into digital freight forwarders.

Shipping companies are also working hard to digitalize their business processes. With “quick quotes” they enable companies and freight forwarders to calculate and book sea freight logistics costs online. This mainly involves container shipments, but also general cargo shipments. The shipping companies’ online “quick quotes” are particularly useful when companies quickly need a reference price for individual shipments.

As good as the options for calculating and booking logistics costs online may be, companies do not get a general overview of freight costs. They still have to obtain price information from various freight forwarders and compare them in a manual process. In extreme cases, freight costs are retrieved 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 means that at most the freight costs can be compared in total, while the individual items remain opaque. In each of these scenarios, it still involves a lot of manual effort for companies 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 described in the following example. If a company wants to transport goods from place to place, it has to enter the relevant shipment details individually in all “quotation tools” of the respective digital freight forwarder. Although this multiple entry is done online, it is also very time-consuming and prone to errors. This means that “online” does not automatically equate to “better quality”. However, there is a way to calculate and book logistics costs that eliminates the sources of error mentioned above.