Freight Procurement for shippers

Shippers save an average of 20% on freight costs and reduce labour effort by 30% through digitized, competitive tendering. An additional 1.5–4% price reduction is achieved through multiple negotiation rounds compared to single-round offline tenders, as iterative feedback drives carriers to sharpen their bids. With 10,000+ RFQs issued per year and access to 50,000+ carrier profiles, the platform maximizes both competitive pressure and award quality.

The rule-based combinatorial engine evaluates trillions of possible allocation combinations in seconds — factoring in cost, capacity, service level, and custom business rules to identify the optimal award scenario. For a multi-lane, multi-carrier tender, the number of combinations grows exponentially; manual analysis in Excel defaults to suboptimal decisions that leave savings on the table. The engine makes mathematically optimal awarding available to any procurement team, regardless of tender complexity.

The platform gives access to 50,000+ carrier profiles globally, searchable by geographic coverage, transport mode, equipment type, and industry specialization — the most extensive freight procurement community in Europe. With 40,000+ active carrier profiles in the supplier database, shippers can immediately expand beyond existing carrier relationships and introduce genuine competitive pressure into every tender, one of the most direct levers for better rates and capacity security.

Yes — the mini-bid capability enables fast, targeted tactical lane requests alongside the full strategic RFQ workflow, all within the same platform. Many shippers are locked into rigid annual tender cycles that leave them unable to react to capacity shifts, seasonal peaks, or mid-year market disruptions. Freight Procurement NextGen removes that constraint: procurement teams can act quickly when conditions change without switching tools or losing audit trail compliance.

Two AI-powered capabilities are built in. Arc enables conversational procurement: users can create, manage, and analyze RFQs through natural language queries rather than manual configuration. The Intelligent RFQ Builder transforms uploaded data into a fully configured tender in minutes. Together, they significantly reduce setup time and manual work across the tender lifecycle — and Arc's analytical capability means bid evaluation and scenario comparison can be done through a single prompt rather than hours of spreadsheet work.

Automatic offer validation enforces bid completeness and structure from the moment submissions arrive: minimum and maximum price specifications, mandatory fields, predefined units, and fixed offer structures ensure all bids are comparable without manual chasing or reformatting. RFI pre-qualification capability — customizable questionnaires and scoring cards — shortlists the right carriers before tendering begins, so only properly structured bids from qualified carriers reach the evaluation stage.

Awarded rates flow directly from Freight Procurement NextGen into Transporeon Rate Management and Transport Assignment, closing the loop between procurement and operations on one platform. This eliminates the manual re-entry of contracted rates into execution systems — a common source of errors and delays when tendering and transport assignment operate in silos. ZF Friedrichshafen AG, tendering globally with Transporeon since 2015, noted: "We have increased speed and significantly reduced administrative expenses."

Every activity is documented with timestamps, creating a full audit trail for every procurement event. Individually configurable approval flows and user rights management ensure the right people review and approve at each step. This delivers compliance with internal governance requirements and external regulatory standards — something manual email-based tendering fundamentally cannot provide. For organizations that need to demonstrate a fair, competitive process, the platform is built around that requirement from the ground up.

Yes — an integrated carbon rating methodology and CO2 emissions tracking let shippers factor sustainability criteria directly into carrier selection and award decisions. As carbon reporting requirements tighten across Europe and globally, having emissions data embedded in the procurement workflow — rather than calculated separately after the fact — makes it significantly easier to meet regulatory obligations and internal ESG commitments without adding manual steps to the tendering process.