How Can Freight Forwarders Enhance Team Productivity Through Automation?

Work smarter, not harder

90% of all data in the freight forwarding industry is still processed manually. From generating proposals to reconciling invoices -- repetitive, time-consuming manual data processing tasks constitute the lion's share of the freight forwarder's day-to-day work.

Manually processing a single customer price request, for example, takes on average up to 60 hours and 12 emails to complete. Manual data entry also often includes errors, which leads to costly rework and delays down the line.

If time is money, manual data reconciliation, assessment and input is costing freight forwarders a fortune -- 40-80% of potential labor savings, according to one study. That's not to mention the impact time-consuming manual data processing has on productivity, response time, performance and revenue.

If freight forwarders hope to succeed in an increasingly competitive industry, automation is the only viable way forward. Here's how automation can enhance team productivity, boost revenue and free up your team to do more high-value work.

Breaking down the inefficiencies

Inefficiencies around data management, processing and analysis cost forwarders time, deals and revenue every day. Data inefficiencies take three primary forms in the freight forwarding workflow:

Data structure

80% of shipping data is unstructured, meaning that it is uncollated, siloed, disorganized, unsearchable and dispersed across multiple data types and locations.

Unstructured data is a business liability, as it can only be processed manually and cannot be automatically synthesized into any meaningful business insights. It also often contains errors and discrepancies which go unnoticed. It's estimated that unstructured data costs the freight industry up to 20% of its revenue every year.

Data type

In any unautomated freight forwarding operation, a multiplicity of data types generates major inefficiencies. Unstructured data takes the form of Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, free-text emails, images, attachments, Word documents and various other forms of documentation. Manually extracting and collating information from various data types is time-consuming and imprecise.

Data volume

The sheer volume of data freight forwarders need to process and manage on any given day is overwhelming. Manual data processing and management at this scale wastes up to 50% of a freight forwarder's time and leads to 30% more inaccuracies.

How can data automation enhance team efficiency?

There are a number of key areas in which data automation can help improve team efficiency:

Structure and enrich multi-format data

The right data automation solution can extract, classify, cleanse and enrich multi-format data from multiple sources, organizing it into a single, searchable database, then analyzing and interpreting it to deliver key actionable insights.

Remove errors and discrepancies

A data automation solution can analyze incoming data in real-time, flagging and correcting errors and discrepancies before they become a problem.

Streamline the proposal creation process

Data automation can help streamline the most time-consuming and complex freight forwarding job function: proposal creation. By automatically analyzing rates and routes, then generating optimized multi-lane proposals in seconds, automated freight forwarding software can save your team hours every day.

Don't wait to automate

Widescale automation of daily manual data processing tasks is the only viable way forward for the freight forwarding industry.

A data management platform like StarDox uses advanced AI and machine learning to fully automate manual processes by transforming unstructured data into structured, enriched data in seconds.

With StarDox, forwarders can:

• Cut price request response times from an average of 60 hours to 3.6 seconds
• Increase data accuracy to 100%
• Translate and convert shippers' price requests from any language and data type into a structured format, directly from their inbox.
• Enrich and restructure carriers' buy price data into a simplified format for speedier analysis of the ideal routes, rates, and margins for shippers.
• Automate proposal creations by using deep learning to match ideal buy prices with price requests.
• Automate and streamline booking requests from shippers to carriers via the freight forwarder's ERP system.

If you're ready to discover how StarDox's automation capabilities can enhance your productivity and revenue potential, book a consultation with us.