Freightender – 3 Excel Practices Sourcing Can Stop Doing Today
Many companies have, over the last 15 years, evolved transportation sourcing to strategic procurement processes with a dedicated staff. Nevertheless, there is still plenty of room for improvement in the logistics procurement process.
Just like material sourcing, the transportation equivalent has followed an evolutionary road, moving upstream from an everyday freight transaction process to an integrated component of top-level corporate planning and procurement strategy. Large and mid-size firms often have procurement teams in place but lack coordination between business units or geographic offices. Moreover, without dedicated automation, the freight RFQ process remains a time-consuming practice. Smaller companies have lean shipping departments and are often focused on moving products fast and energy remaining to negotiate contracts and analyze freight spend.
But as a strategic process, transportation sourcing remains intensive, tedious and challenging. Managing bid packages, for instance, can be time-consuming and complex. It makes sense that strategy is often replaced for immediate needs of getting products shipped out the door, sourced on the lowest cost variant. Moreover, the lack of tools is often causing an intransparent trail throughout the DNA of a company. A strategic approach, together with a dedicated transportation sourcing solution streamlines the bid process in several ways. In this blog, we merely focus on the automation part of freight tenders. In general, there are 6 components that can be automated.
6 Tender functions that can be automated
- Communication
- Data collection / management
- Lane and rate card construction
- Reporting and analysis
- Scenario building
- Nomination
3 Excel Practices LOGISTICS PROCUREMENT Can Stop Doing Today
1. Stop building lanes in Excel
2. Stop constructing rate cards in Excel
3. Stop running analysis and reporting in Excel
More Tactics that drive strategic transport and logistics tenders
Here are more strategies that improve freight tender management with supply chain advantages as a result. When looking for transportation tender software, Chief Procurement Officers should look for the following features:
- Manage bids for all modes of transportation with one tool, inside the cloud.
- Choose what you share. You can provide suppliers with extended lane metrics, helping them speed up the process or cherry-pick.
- Tender software supporting multiple round bidding
- Analysis of historical shipment data and costs
- Extended scenario-building
- The ability to calculate subjective information unrelated to pricing
3 Excel Practices Sourcing Can Stop Doing Today – Freightender freight E-tendering TWEET THIS!
Conclusion
Companies looking to streamline logistics costs or improve trade routes should aim towards a strong combination of technology (sourcing software) and a strategic sourcing process. The procurement of freight has a significant influence on how shippers and logistics providers manage the relationships with transportation partners. In that sense, companies working with an exclusive Excel-based freight sourcing process, are missing out on strategic benefits.
About Freightender Freight E-Tendering
Freightender E-sourcing is rapidly becoming the standard in freight tendering. We are actively engaged to take away the frustrations, complications and high costs in logistics tenders. Our clients are extremely satisfied with our comprehensive platform. It allows everyone involved with logistics to create and manage tenders in an easy and structured way. Next to that, we take away issues regarding communication and data management. Want to learn more? Please leave your details and we are more than happy to provide you and your team with a demo. Thank you for reading and don’t be shy sharing this content to anyone who can use it!
Request a free, online demo of Freightender here
