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Rate confirmation, also known as Ratecon, is a legal agreement between the freight broker and carrier. A traditional PDF rate confirmation takes freight brokers a minimum of 15 minutes to fill out. By automating this process, brokers can reach out to a single or dozens of carriers in a few clicks which drastically changes the pace and the ability to win loads.
Investing in quality software is a practical way to streamline your operations and communications. TMS has been evolving over the years and choosing the right one can save you time and money.
There are quite a number of TMS packages on the market today. Navigating the various options can be pretty overwhelming. Here’s a breakdown of what to look for when shopping for a good TMS.
Rate negotiation and confirmation are a crucial part of your workflow and have the potential to be quite time-consuming. With a TMS, you should be able to handle the confirmation process much quicker.
On its online portal, you should be able to send confirmation forms with just a click. Often, the portal will have an email dialog that’ll pop up. This email address should be the email of the default account holder, but you can change it to a different email target if need be.
When emailed, this electronic confirmation form will most often have the Load Acceptance link. Clicking on it leads to an external Load Confirmation page which will then provide you with the details of the dispatcher.
Once the carrier accepts the load, the system is expected to automatically update the dispatch to reflect this change in status. The system should also send an email to the dispatcher, notifying them that the carrier has accepted. Finally, the system should send an email to the carrier with the full Load Confirmation document attached.
The idea is to eliminate the manual aspect of filling out a manual confirmation form. Manually doing so exposes the process to errors and time-wasting that would have otherwise been avoided had the confirmation form been filled digitally.
In just a few clicks, you should be able to have every field on the rate confirmation form filled perfectly. This is a great timesaving tool as you end up spending less time re-typing information. Besides, typing is prone to errors. By minimizing the amount of information that needs to be typed, you reduce the risks of error.
Overall, the software should be able to take data from rate confirmations and populate new loads to save time and reduce errors.
A TMS should facilitate instant sharing of information with both carriers and customers. You no longer have to wait days to send rate confirmations and receive feedback.
It would help if you also didn’t have to grapple with the tediousness of forgotten passwords, faxed documents, or email threads. All you need to do is send one link to the recipient.
You want the entire team to have access to the current rate confirmation forms from anywhere in the world, and the TMS should enable this. The software should enable the assigning of specific permissions to each of your team members. Other than making it possible for you to see who is accessing the portal, the software should be able to give you a report of who made any changes. While you want to provide access to the software to people regardless of where they are, you still want to maintain some form of control.
Total visibility into your supply chain ensures you maximize efficiency when managing your freight rates. No matter how much transport data and how many freight contracts you have, having real-time visibility means centralized rate management. Besides, with real-time visibility, you are able to support seamless team collaboration, especially when you’ve got a remote team.
To stay competitive, you cannot afford to manually transfer data after the acceptance of the rate confirmation form. These traditional OCR solutions are not only slow, but they are also expensive and prone to error. Most importantly, they end up wasting valuable employee talent.
You want the software to capture the data quickly, accurately, and automatically. This eliminates tiresome data entry, which drives your team to greater efficiency and growth. The market standard is software that allows up to 90 percent of data extraction to be done automatically. Overall, your business should benefit from automated and consequently streamlined data entry.
With the customer portal and carrier portal, both shippers and carriers can review the digital copies of rate confirmations and sign digitally without ever having to print a single thing. Regardless of the browser you are working with, you should be able to sign directly without printing, scanning, or faxing. This digital rate confirmation access and signing take your business to the next level.
The TMS should eliminate the need to pay for multiple systems like Dropbox. Specifically, it should come with built-in secure document management and preferably one that’s on the cloud.
Rate confirmation software redefines the management of freight rates by linking data-driven technologies and logistics expertise. You want to automate the process to ensure you create consistency with the rate confirmation forms. Besides, it should automatically integrate into the rate management for a seamless end-to-end process. Concisely, a good TMS will contain features that will allow the carrier to update brokers on arrivals, departures, check calls, and status updates on the various shipments.
Why spend hours creating pdf templates and filling them out when Tai offers you the opportunity to create professional-quality rate confirmations?
Tai software enables you to automate and streamline your shipping process. The result is fewer manual processes and more cost savings digitally. Our digitized workflow instantly fills all the required shipment information, along with customizable legal text, your logo, and whatever other customization you require. What’s more, your partners can review shipments, and access or decline terms and conditions, along with other self-service capabilities. All this is available online with just a single login.
Overall, Tai TMS is an all-in-one platform for quoting, booking, and tracking shipments. Tai TMS promises to speed up processes and help your business gain operational visibility. Your rate confirmation should be more straightforward with our automation capabilities and direct integrations. Request a demo today and experience Tai TMS for yourself.
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