While the idea of digitalization has been around the maritime industry for a considerable time, the nagging issue is the adoption of rates within the ecosystem.
Fragmentation has been a problem from the shipper side of the market, as the hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized shippers stay oblivious to the advantages that digitalization begets.
For the massive container lines, while digitalization has been realized within their operations to a large extent, true end-to-end visibility has still been out of grasp.
However, maritime logistics stakeholders have been on the move, looking to forge partnerships that can benefit customers that cut across organizations. Stakeholders largely lack visibility beyond their immediate partners, which severely restricts their resilience to volatility in container capacity availability.
Collaborations help symbiotically improve inter-tier operations, as joint partnerships can enhance processes, optimize costs, increase visibility, and gain more leverage by unifying data streams across organizations. Strategic collaboration can have companies gain new efficiencies and widen their offerings for their user base.
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Vanguard Logistics partners with Freightify
Less-than-container load (LCL) consolidation firm Vanguard Logistics has joined hands with Freightify, in a step to improve visibility and provide instant quoting possibilities to its users.
Freightify provides a rate management platform that enables freight forwarders gain access to all their live freight rates and schedules within a single screen.
Vanguard has been at the forefront of freight consolidation across the LCL non-vessel operating common carrier (NVOCC) space for over 40 years, with a presence across more than 100 countries. Vanguard continues to improve on its platform, ensuring it simplifies pricing, booking, and visibility for its customers.
The extraordinary circumstances today within the maritime ecosystem has left shippers and forwarders wishing for visibility into freight capacity availability in the market, even as rates climb ever higher. LCL capacity is in high demand, as tight availability of containers pushes shippers to jump from full containers to LCL for moving delayed freight.
Being a NVOCC, Vanguard’s position in the market would be strengthened by improving their quoting velocity, making them favorable with shippers. Freightify would provide this service to Vanguard’s customers, helping them streamline operations and make data-driven decisions.
Quoting has been a slow and time-consuming process in the industry, which makes pricing unclear for shippers. With a significant portion of shipment not having a digital footprint, quotes and capacity might sometimes get redundant.
With capacity being in short supply over the last year, complexities like these could spell trouble. Freightify will eliminate these hassles, providing customers with quotes for both spot and contract rates.
Freightify users quickly see the return on investment, with companies reporting average quote times of around 2.5 minutes, resulting in exponential user growth. This was possible due to swifter quoting, increasing the propensity for shippers to choose the platform-converting into clients.
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