How Importers Automate Freight Procurement, From RFQ to Booking
Freight quoting and booking is a manual grind that lives outside your ERP. Here is how mid-market importers automate the RFQ, the comparison, and the booking, without a freight desk.
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TL;DR
- Freight procurement is one of the most repetitive manual jobs in an importer's back office, and it runs again on every single shipment.
- The work lives outside your ERP by design: you email forwarders, wait for quotes in mismatched formats, and rebuild the comparison by hand. The ERP only records the freight cost after you have already booked.
- aradus runs the request for quote out to your forwarders, and through the goods2load partnership to new forwarders in the G2L network, then parses every quote back into one comparison.
- It recommends a booking and lets you confirm in one click, and it holds for a person when the cheapest option is not the right call.
- It is a layer on top of the ERP you already run, not a TMS, a forwarder, or a rate marketplace you log into. Book a working session.
The freight desk is usually one person, an inbox, and a spreadsheet
Ask a mid-market importer who runs freight procurement and you rarely get a team. You get a name. One person who, for every shipment that needs a rate, opens their inbox and emails the same handful of forwarders. Then they wait. Quotes come back over the next few hours or the next day, each in its own shape: one in the body of an email, one as a PDF, one pasted from a portal. The person lines them up by hand in a spreadsheet, tries to compare like for like across rate, transit time, and terms, picks one, and books it. Then they key the cost back into the ERP so the landed cost is right.
None of that is complicated. That is exactly the problem. It is simple, it is repetitive, and it repeats on every shipment, which is why it quietly eats a person's week. And the clock matters more than it looks: ocean freight rates move week to week, so a quote has a short shelf life. Every hour the comparison sits half-built is an hour the rates underneath it are going stale.
Why this work never lived in your ERP
It is tempting to ask why the ERP does not just do this. The honest answer is the same one behind most of the manual work around a distribution business: your ERP was never going to do this. An ERP is a system of record. It keeps the truth about a shipment once the truth exists. It does not go out, email five forwarders, and come back with fresh quotes. Fetching a rate is an action out in the world, across inboxes and portals the ERP cannot see, and a system of record does not take actions in the world.
So the freight cost only enters the ERP at the end, after a person has already done the real work of getting it, comparing it, and choosing. The procurement itself, the part that actually takes the time, happens in the gap around the system, which is the same gap where order entry, supplier chasing, and logistics already live. Freight procurement is not a failed ERP feature. It is a category of work the ERP was never built to hold.
How aradus connects
aradus sits on top of the systems you already run. It reads the orders and shipments already in your ERP, so it knows what needs to move and when. From there it does the part the ERP cannot: it goes out to your forwarders, gathers the quotes, and brings them back in a form a person can decide on in seconds instead of an afternoon.
How it works
It runs the RFQ for you, to more forwarders than you have time to chase. aradus sends the request for quote to the forwarders you already work with. Through the goods2load partnership, it can also reach new forwarders in the G2L network, so a thin bench is not a ceiling on how competitive your quotes are. You are not limited to the three forwarders you always email because they are the ones whose format you already know.
It parses every quote into one comparison. The quotes come back the way they always do, in different formats and layouts. aradus reads them and normalizes them into a single, like-for-like comparison: rate, transit time, and terms side by side. The mismatched-formats problem, the thing that makes the spreadsheet necessary, is gone.
It recommends, and you book in one click. aradus puts forward a recommended option with the trade-offs visible, and you confirm the booking in one click. The cost flows back to the order without a second round of keying.
The booking becomes a tracked shipment. The moment you confirm, the shipment has an identity that is already attached to the order it belongs to, which is the thing that makes tracking answerable later rather than researched later. A shipment record created in an inbox never gets that.
It keeps chasing after the booking. Getting the rate is the start. The same shipment then needs a confirmed sailing, documents that actually arrive, and a container that gets released, and every one of those is somebody else's answer to give. That is the follow-up half of the job, covered in the calls nobody makes.
It holds for a person when the trade-off is not obvious. The cheapest quote is not always the right one. A faster transit time, a more reliable carrier on a tight customs window, or a term that de-risks the lane can matter more than a small saving. When the call is not clear-cut, aradus does not guess. It puts the decision, with the trade-off laid out, in front of a person. That boundary is the point: the routine gets automated, the judgment stays with you.
The manual desk next to aradus
| The manual freight desk | With aradus |
|---|---|
| Email a fixed handful of forwarders, one shipment at a time | RFQ goes to your forwarders and, via goods2load, new ones in the G2L network |
| Quotes arrive in mismatched formats over hours or a day | Quotes parsed into one like-for-like comparison |
| Rebuild the comparison by hand in a spreadsheet | The comparison is built for you, rate, transit, and terms side by side |
| Pick, book, then re-key the cost into the ERP | Confirm in one click, cost flows back to the order |
| Every shipment starts from zero | The routine runs itself, a person steps in only on the real decisions |
What aradus does not replace
aradus is not a TMS, and it is not a freight forwarder. It does not move your cargo and it does not replace the forwarders you trust. It is also not a rate marketplace you log into and work inside. It runs your procurement, across your relationships plus the goods2load network, on top of the ERP you already have. The forwarders stay yours. The keying goes away.
What good automation needs first
This works when two things are true. First, you have forwarder relationships worth quoting against, which almost every importer does. Second, your orders and shipments actually live in your ERP, so aradus knows what needs a rate and can send the cost back to the right place. If your shipment data is scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets with nothing connecting them, that is the thing to tidy first, and it is a smaller job than it sounds. Getting freight procurement onto solid ground is also the natural neighbor of getting your shipment documents right before the container sails, because the shipment you just booked is the same one that has to clear customs.
The freight desk does not have to be a desk
The work will not stop being necessary. Rates still have to be gathered, compared, and chosen on every shipment. What can change is who does the gathering and the comparing. aradus takes the RFQ, the parsing, and the booking off a person's plate, and leaves them the one thing that actually needs a human: the decision. If you want to see what that looks like against your own lanes and forwarders, book a working session.