RFQ/RFP Logistics - Time to Tender for Freight

Many companies do a review of their supply chain/logistics costs and service in the Fall. Staff are back at work and the summer holiday season is finally over . Year end is just a few short months away and the last quarter for most organizations tend to be the biggest.

For small companies, with only a few vendors, it's as simple as asking for an updated quotation from 2 or 3 service providers that have been used in the past or are in fact their current provider.

Other companies however have multi-destination and multi-origin needs which requires a more formalized approach as well as time to populate their quotation request. Forwarders and logistics companies, as a rule, really don't like being benchmarked and even in these tough economic times, do not respond or quote competitively to those companies that seem to be spamming. If a forwarder or logistics company feels especially that their rates will be disclosed to the competition for the purpose of negotiating with another forwarder, the response will be in most cases, unsatisfactory.

One way to avoid this is to provide a serious and accurate RFQ tender to the forwarder with historical data as well as the option for them to provide a breakdown of the door to door costs.
This way the logistics company will have an overview of the volume of your account and quote competitively.

The RFQ /RFP document provides both a spreadsheet to document the transactions, in detail or in short form as well as a complete quotation breakdown.
Free of charge and broken down into Air, Ocean, Road, Customs, or combined, it's easily available at http://www.secondreview.ca/logistics/rfqlogistics.html