Given the poor economic conditions, companies are looking for the opportunity to reduce costs and one hot area that is ripe with potential savings is to conduct transportation procurement bids. The process involves sending bid packages (aggregated forecast of shipments) to carriers, they submit their bids (often involving multiple rounds) and then you evaluate the bids and award the business.

There are a number of software solutions in the Transportation Procurement space that will automate and optimize the whole process.  These procurement solutions do not just consider carrier rates but optimize the results considering carrier performance, capacity, seasonal variability, equipment requirements, service level and business rules.  The benefits realized from these solutions include more reliable capacity with fewer rejected shipments, higher on-time delivery performance, drastically reduced procurement time with a substantial cost savings.

This link has an interesting article from Adrian Gonzalez of ARC Advisory that discusses this topic in further detail: http://logisticsviewpoints.com/2009/05/21/transportation-procurement-is-hot-right-now/

Many shipper's international supply chain processes are manual intensive and rely on phone, fax or email to arrange ocean bookings.  International logistics automation has not been a priority for most companies with many relying on freight forwarders and brokers to handle it for them.

In order to eliminate errors and reduce costs, companies like retail giant Lowe's (100K annual container moves) are automating their ocean booking process by utilizing a global technology solution. Shippers without the budget for a technology solution can utilize INTTRA's booking portal which is free for shippers. INTTRA has relationships with most of the major ocean carriers (but not all) and charges them a transaction fee for the bookings. INTTRA also has a related portal called oceanschedules.com, which offers shippers the ability to search for ocean voyages for no charge.

http://www.scdigest.com/assets/On_Target/09-05-27-1.php?cid=2485