Why Automation is a Game-Changer For Freight Forwarders

The day to day operations of freight forwarding organizations mean that forwarders are constantly juggling multiple activities and tasks that take away their focus from their core business processes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in data extraction and management processes.

Still predominantly a manual process, data extraction for creating proposals and optimizing route and rate offerings is, in essence, a slow and tedious process - one that costs both time and money!

It's a cog in the machine that slows down all other key operations, impacts accuracy and causes forwarders to resort to turning away business thanks to overwhelming volumes of incoming data.

In an industry that is driven by speed and accuracy, freight forwarders simply cannot afford to cling to outdated legacy systems and traditional ways of operating. Automation offers a quick, efficient and cost-effective solution to streamlining and simplifying complex, convoluted manual processes.

What Does a Freight Forwarders' Day-to-Day Look Like?

Upon closer examination of a freight forwarder's daily workload, it's unsurprising that forwarders struggle so consistently with incoming business volume and end up losing revenue. On the one hand, forwarders are juggling with large volumes of incoming price requests from shippers in a variety of formats and languages, often riddled with errors and omissions.

Forwarders need to manually extract the data from these price requests, interpret them, correct them, analyze them and then submit them to carriers. Carriers then send back their buy prices, generally pages long and also in a variety of formats. These also need to be analyzed before the ideal buy price is selected and reformatted into an official shipping proposal.

Keep in mind that this is a manual process that generates a single shipping proposal. It needs to be repeated each and every time a price request comes in.

What Are These Inefficiencies Costing Forwarders in their Output?

The problem, then, of massive influxes of unstructured data becomes crystal clear. Forwarders don't have the operational capacity to effectively deal with incoming unstructured data on both sides of the proposal creation process.

Forwarding companies constantly find themselves unable to scale without hiring additional staff to deal with incoming price requests and buy price data, which drives up operational costs and is only an interim solution. As more and more business comes in, forwarders will need to keep increasing their staff headcount to keep up, impacting their bottom line.

On top of this, expanding your manual operations doesn't, in any way, reduce the possibility of errors creeping into your proposals, unhappy shippers and burnt out, unproductive staff.

How Can Automation Help Forwarders and Brokers Overcome These Challenges?

Automation of data extraction, translation and utilization is a simple but powerful weapon that allows forwarders to break through their efficiency and productivity ceilings and enhance their operations by getting rid of outdated, manual procedures that are a time and cost sink.

By opting for automation, freight forwarders can streamline their data management operations and increase their revenue, all without sacrificing their accuracy and quality of output and service.

The most important thing, here, is to ensure you're selecting a tool that offers the extensive automation capabilities you're looking for. A data centralization platform like Stargo uses AI and deep learning to effortlessly automate and enhance your processes:

• Extract, cleanse, and enrich incoming unstructured data from any language or format
• Autocorrect and complete erroneous or incomplete data using predictive analytics
• Research and generate multi-lane buy prices in seconds
• Optimize your shipping rates and margins using ML models and historical data
• Generate structured, accurate shipping proposals at the click of a button

Conclusion

Investing in automation is the only surefire way for freight forwarders to win at the volume/accuracy/revenue data conundrum they find themselves in and free themselves from expensive, time-consuming manual data management. Opting for an all-in-one digital solution like Stargo allows you to do this, scaling your business and growing your revenue with ease.

If you're ready to learn how Stargo can automate and improve your data management workflows, book a demo with us.