Freight forwarding is a rapid-pace and fascinating industry that deal with many parties.
Nowadays, as a freight forwarder, the ability to ensure that the freight is delivered to the destination on time is no longer your silver bullet. "Service" or more specifically, "Personalized Service" has became the key to offer to your customer, that differentiate you with another freight forwarder.
Challenges of freight forwarding industry
"Customer Service" excellency will require quick response to the clients via various possible channels, such as email, WhatsApp, phone call, web, etc. Client cases such as loading delay, weight & space issue, must be handled swiftly to improve the loyalty.
Various parties are involving in the freight forwarding operation, which include forwarding agent, haulier, shipping agent, oversea agent, client, custom clearance, insurance agent, etc. Keeping up the communication history and follow up with many parties are no easy job.
Keeping track of documents such as Bill of Lading (Airway/Seaway), HBL, Packing List, Customer invoice, Shipping Instruction, custom clearance documents (K1 form, K2 form, etc), etc.
Lack of Analytic insight to the Sales, Cost and Profit of each Job.
Current State of freight forwarding software
a) Predominantly client-based desktop software that does not support access outside of the office and view-able only on the installed desktop. Many are even simply customized from the old fashion accounting software, with no proper product road-map.
b) Let's face it. Those old and outdated design of the UI are often filled with cluttering view, not interactive and not user-friendly. Search and navigation around are really clumsy and limited.
c) User can't access their freight forwarding software outside of the office and especially not mobile enabled. It has made the customer service team less responsive to client's query and emergency.
d) Communication history are scattering, such as email and documents, are in the email inbox, hard copy documents, soft copy in local PC or shared drive. Loosing these documents is a potential risk that cannot be ignored.
e) Freight system is hosted on premise (in the office), and often without the IT resource attending to it.
f) Poor support from non-local vendor, which would not be able to keep up closely with the changes of the local regulatory and requirements.
Values of GoExcel Freight Cloud-based Software, Powered by Odoo
GoExcel Freight Software is part of the GoExcel Logistics Solution, and end-to-end cloud-based solution for Logistics company.
The design principle of GoExcel Freight is center around ease of use and efficiency and the ultimate goal is for optimal process automation and paperless process.
1) Support end to end freight forwarding process from sales quotation to the booking job, to invoice and vendor bill, with full Accounting feature.
2) Quick creation of sales quotation with the approved selling rate and convert to booking job.
3) Organize your shipment in Kanban view, Calendar View, pivot, etc, for easy tracking via status and quick analysis with Pivot table and Graph.
4) Intuitive and interactive UI to capture Booking job and printing of Bill of Lading and Booking Confirmation.
4) Web and Mobile browser enabled with the same UI, for easy access, anywhere and anytime.
5) Integrate with own accounting module for your financial, cost and profit analysis. Printing of customer invoices, account statement, balance sheet, partner ledger, etc.
6) Reminder to customer service team to follow up for various dateline, such as booking confirmation, haulage pick up, shipping instruction confirmation, BL confirmation, closing date/time, shipment arrival, etc.
7) Embed the OCR technology to scan document, such as vendor invoice, to auto-create vendor bill. This will reduce human mistake and improve efficiency.
8) Communication history, such as email and messages are stored centrally in each of the booking job to make it easy to find and trace. Digitized your archive files by synchronized it automatically to your google drive.
9) Insight to the cost and profit analysis, and drill down to a granular level .
10) Customer portal for your client to view the Sale Quotation, Invoice, etc. Customer may submit Shipping Instruction online and reduce the manual work to copy to the Booking Job.
Excelroot has a long term roadmap to further enhance GoExcel Freight software to support EDI integration to the liner, to fully automate the sailing schedule, booking and confirmation, receive BL, vessel arrival and receive the vendor invoice. Also in the roadmap is the integration to the Automated Manifest System (AMS) for US custom department.
Contact us if you are looking for a trusted, long term logistic software partner and inquire for our monthly subscription model.
You can also find GoExcel Logistics preview video here.
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