How transparent is your freight negotiation process?

Shipping goods internationally, especially on a large scale, can be quite a task. While dealing with international shipments, logistics teams are faced with three fundamental questions: 

Which freight forwarder is the best fit for their business?

Who among all the interested freight forwarders, is the most reliable? 

And most importantly, how can they get the best deal at the best price? 

While the first two questions can be handled with ample research, dealing with the third question is complicated. Negotiating well is the key to paying less for your freight procurement. Without the right tools in place, manually creating, comparing and negotiating rates with individual freight forwarders to secure the best deal, becomes a daunting experience.

Gathering copious amounts of information to put together a suitable RFQ is a time consuming, but crucial process. A whirlwind of activities follows with your logistics team reaching out to all the vendors with the RFQ and negotiating quotes in a short time span. Moreover, the traditional process has been plagued with inefficiencies. 

A troubling question in light of this information is how transparent is your current freight negotiation process?

Manual freight negotiations affect your bottom line 

Negotiating rates manually is quite a hassle. Keeping a track of all the bids received, selecting the vendor with the lowest quote and engaging with the vendors via emails or calls, makes it difficult to document the important details.

One crucial thing to note is the matching of the final invoice with the initially posed contract. Often, due to human error certain costs and taxes get excluded while generating invoices and these discrepancies get revealed much later, damaging your bottom line. These instances showcase the clear lack of transparency in freight negotiations. Such misconceptions are to be expected in any business, which leads to the next question: 

Can we eliminate human intervention from the negotiation process? 

Taking the smart way out with GoComet

Automating your RFQ process solves all these challenges in a single go. Right from bringing all the vendors to a common platform, to notifying them of their current rank in the bidding process as well as alerting them when selected, GoComet has got you covered.

With its unique RFQ platform, negotiating with multiple vendors simultaneously gets a whole lot easier. GoComet follows the recursive rate reduction system, wherein the vendors compete with each other to give you the best deal at the best price.

All your logistics team has to do is raise an RFQ. The system makes it possible to create and share RFQ with multiple vendors simultaneously within minutes. From there on, GoComet deploys automation to enable your vendors to negotiate with each other without the need for your team to intervene. 

·   By consolidating all the activities into a single platform, GoComet’s platform removes the need for face-to-face negotiation, thereby eliminating vendor bias.

·   By automatically sending out alerts of vendor rankings in the queue, the need for sending out updates manually is not required.

·   Onboarding new vendors might have seemed like an impossible task to accomplish previously, but not so with GoComet’s software.

·   Every transaction, quote, and related information is documented systematically after a freight forwarder has been selected.

·   It even provides full visibility in all the logistics procedures with effective audit and compliance norms.

Unprecedented transparency with GoComet 

GoComet creates an audit trail for all your shipments with the help of the data that your supply chain generates. This makes it possible to find out who provides you with the best service within a click and make informed decisions at all times. 

By meticulously keeping a record of the original and agreed upon contract, invoice matching becomes possible. Any discrepancies between that and the final invoice can be immediately resolved. If in case the logistics team decides to go ahead with a vendor whose bid is not the lowest quote, listing their reasons helps to provide visibility to the audit team. Misunderstandings are avoided, thereby promoting transparency throughout the process.

A transparent and automated RFQ process helps better your vendor relations as well as reduce the cost of your logistic operations up to 15%. It also makes sure the bidding takes place in a fair manner with no corrupt practices tarnishing the process.

For increased productivity, reduced turnaround time and streamlined logistics operations, reach us here.