Manage contracts and rates like never before.
For years, freight forwarders have been effective facilitators of global shipping with one critical exception: operational efficiency in rate management. More specifically, forwarders’ ability to quickly, accurately and confidentially manage rates as they work with carriers, agents, and their shipper customers and agent-partners. Carriers structure rates one way, customers want their quotes another, and forwarders have been caught in the middle, trying to account for every buy rate, every sell rate, tariff and surcharge for every trade lane
and transportation mode. Traditionally, this information has been stored on spreadsheets, lengthy contracts and amendments that get emailed from party to party in hopes that the rates are understood, valid and kept confidential. It’s an inefficient, ineffective and often inaccurate process — one that steals valuable resources away from tasks like quoting more shipments. Rate management is complex, to say the least, given the number of firms who’ve tried and failed to solve this problem.
Enter: CargoSphere.
Since we began working with NVOs and forwarders in 2001, CargoSphere has invested heavily in product development and technology rather than emphasizing services. While we do offer rate management services, we strive every day to empower our customers with a world-class rate management solution built on relentless innovation and improvements.
All of this passion for product development and commitment to customers has helped us to design an elegant information architecture to solve an important business problem: How can we make the management and distribution of rates more efficient? Our solution is one that’s a win-win-win for you, your customers and your partners. We’ve studied forwarders’ needs closely, listened to their pain-points, and applied our learnings in every product development cycle for 12 years. We understand that the way you receive rates from carriers differs vastly from how you are expected to deliver quotes to your customers (buy vs. sell rates). We know that rates expire quickly, require constant updates and are subject to endless accessorial charges. We know that being able to query your carrier contracts and buy rates in real-time and receive bottom-line costs in 1 to 3 seconds is highly valuable — especially in a rate environment with so many moving parts. We know that operational efficiency in rate management directly impacts your profitability.
How CargoSphere can help
CargoSphere allows you to manage rates better than with any other tool or process. It gives you universal, easy and fast access to rates — both on the buy and sell side. It allows you to search rates from your own contracts as well as those from agent partners and co-loaders and get results in seconds. CargoSphere has many, many features and functions that have been tried, tested and hardened by your industry peers for a dozen years. Our passion to innovate in this space remains strong and is evidenced by our ground-breaking technology SUDS.
Meet your partners in the Mesh.
Your buy rates are now in place. So is your pricing strategy. Which shipping partners will you share your rates with? How will they receive your rates? Answer: The CargoSphere Rate Mesh — an intertwined network of shipping partners that allows you to accurately and efficiently distribute and receive rates. CargoSphere Rate Mesh keeps you in control while staying connected. You decide which partners see which rates. You determine whose rates you want to receive. The CargoSphere Rate Mesh was designed to keep your rates confidential, but also make you more competitive in the shipping marketplace.
Advanced collaboration tools.
CargoSphere helps everyone work better together, both internally and externally. Sales colleagues can submit internal RFQs to the Pricing department. Then, Pricing can respond directly to Customer or back to Sales team members. Even your Operations colleagues can query quotes and historical rates from any contract stored in CS Rate Mesh.
Externally, CargoSphere helps you connect to customers and partners in new ways. For example, customers can send you RFQs right through your system or view a set of sell rates on a Guest System you may create for confidential viewing. You can also pull buy rates from agent partners directly into your system with NO WORK. Some agents share up to 30 contracts via the Rate Mesh so this can be a huge time savings. Conversely, you can share your rates with partners with the same speed and ease.
CargoSphere makes it easy to receive rates from CargoSphere-enabled carriers, co-loaders and consolidators, thanks to our powerful carrier console that allows carriers and consolidators to efficiently distribute their rates to their customers.
Close more deals by quoting more deals.
Response time is critical when creating quotations. And CargoSphere helps you close more deals by allowing you to create more quotes, more profitably. How? By enabling you to build quotes straight from your buy rate, thus protecting your margins. CargoSphere allows you to build quotes exactly how you or your customers want them structured. For example, you might need to control whether your quote includes the name of your carrier, freight rate details, inland rates or shipment fees and tariffs. All of these are configured through the Display Options console. Quotes can be generated in HTML or Excel. The choices are yours.
What’s more, our Floodgate ® technology allows you to easily update quotations when market conditions change, no matter how complex. What used to take hours, now takes just minutes.
Enjoy efficiency everywhere.
CargoSphere tracks all activity between internal and external constituents. Our built-in analytics and reporting tools monitor and measure your team’s performance. From response times to win rates to identifying bottlenecks in the process, our system helps you optimize your quoting process like never before.
Be competitive and compliant.
As an added convenience, CargoSphere’s solution will support you in complying with Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) regulations for tariff self-publishing and Negotiated Rate Arrangements (NRAs), eliminating the need to outsource to third-party tariff publishers. CargoSphere’s Quote Module is fully integrated with the tariff publishing and NRA features to make the entire process fast, comprehensive and easy to use. Whether TRIs or NRAs are made from quotations or from scratch, CargoSphere’s duplicate checks provide greater confidence in achieving FMC regulatory compliance.
