The Challenge
For many shippers, a single annual RFP is no longer sufficient for controlling costs amid fluctuating rates. Capstone’s partner, an international grocery distributor, needed to host RFPs one or more times per week to minimize the risk of committing to long-term pricing.
The partner’s RFP workflow was cumbersome and involved sending out spreadsheets to more than 85 different carriers, adjusting formatting to be consistent for each response, and compiling all the individual spreadsheets into one master spreadsheet. This made it difficult for the team to manage more than one bid per month. It also left little time for analysis, which had to be done manually in Microsoft Excel.
The Solution
As a long-time Capstone Warehouse Services client, the partner turned to Capstone for its integrated freight management capabilities and RFP hosting platform called BidDex. While other major RFP hosting tools on the market were expensive and clunky, BidDex was affordable. Its simplified design was user-friendly for both the partner and its carriers. Onboarding was quick and painless, with site setup and data integrations taking less than one week.
With BidDex, the team can quickly and easily send and receive bids, manage awards, and analyze pricing data in one place.
BidDex Workflow:
Collect: Initiate, receive, and manage inbound bids with ease. Store historical proposalsfor fast and easy access.
Analyze: Quickly compare contract rates with market rates to better manage savings.
Execute: Build an optimal routing guide and manage awards easily and more effectively.
Partner Profile:
One of the largest grocery distributors in North America
Project Snapshot:
The partner needed a way to speed up the RFP hosting process to be able to host more frequent RFPs and minimize the risk of committing to rates long-term during market volatility.
The Results
Given the time savings achieved with BidDex, the partner can now host RFPs more often, and avoid getting locked into costly long-term rates. In their first six months using BidDex, the partner hosted nearly 60 RFPs (up from their previous rate of one RFP per year).
The partner achieves further savings by holding 2-round RFPs, which were not previously possible due to time constraints and the increased risk of mistakes in Excel. With BidDex,a second round is quick and easy, and the risk of human error is minimized.
Before BidDex, the partner had little time left over for analysis, which had to be done manually in Excel. Now, reporting and performance analysis is fast and easy. The Award Tracker dashboard lets users analyze awarded and executed lanes for improved management of bid revenue. Data includes a record of every rate change and is accessible to all stakeholders, not housed on one person’s computer and spread across hundreds of static files.
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