In recent years, the freight forwarding industry is undergoing great changes, due to new technological advancements and inventions. There is an influx of new logistics start-ups; it could be quite difficult to keep up with all these changes. Forwarders may not even know which freight forwarding software to use.
Customers evolving expectations are significantly increasing, which means that the custom cargo software development company needs to bring immense changes. They should find ways to carve out the more lucrative elements of the value chain and develop the right strategy to meet these needs. Now companies have started to realize the importance of technologies and the adoption of sophisticated freight forwarding software that provides greater efficiency and more collaborative business models, due to their shopper-centered approach.
What is freight forwarding software?
Custom freight management software is used to help companies in their daily operations including communicating with customers, partners, agents, and carriers. It helps the company to arrange imports and exports, create documentations, manage and track. It acts as a middle man between the shipper and transportation services, liaisoning with various carriers to negotiate on price, decide on the most economical, reliable, and fastest route. The whole process for their shippers from the storage to the shipping is managed by freight forwarding software. It helps in booking administering and tracking activities. It gives a shipper a user-friendly experience in finding the best rates, searching for more appropriate transport modes and options, control delivery, compute for prices. It also helps in general accounting tasks, from recording transactions to making invoices. SaaS-based freight forwarding software streamlines business flow and increases productivity to generate bigger profits.
Features of freight logistics software development
This fleet management software helps forwarders to manage freight, shipments, quotes, accounting, and documentation fast and easily.
User Roles
In this feature user customization, description of their privileges within the freight forwarding system that grants access to the features and functionality of the system. User roles of manager, user, and administrator.
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Managers can design routes, schedule pickups, track shipments, upload documents, view reports, send invoices, etc.
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The administrator can manage every aspect of the freight forwarding platform and has visibility to all features and settings.
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Users will have basic permissions to request, save quotes, track, and trace, message, etc.
- Manager dashboard:
The manager can see the list of tables that allow them to access different and important areas of the freight forwarding solution. This list of the main hub of navigation around the freight forwarding system like shipments, quotation, billing & invoicing, networks, reports, notifications, settings.
- Shipments:
This feature helps you to know about delivery, pickup, and managing all the shipments in place. It contains the following information about the company name, pick-up date, departure, destination, delivery date, status. You can even find more information about invoices, documents, messaging, quotes, etc.
- Quotation:
Billing and Invoicing: Find all the information about invoices and bills. Choose active and delivered shipments, select the freight types, or search, you can also select list/map tabs or go to the analytics button. You can pay faster with recurring invoices, accept credit cards and many payment gateways, send automatic payment reminders to secure your cash flow.
- Customer management:
Easy sorting and filtering well-organized data to get every detail about the customers in one place.
- Quoting:
There are numerous transport data and freight rates that should be managed within one software. You can process complex rate structures, surcharges, and alternative transport options with this feature It brings orders to rate structures and also handles freight rates in complex organizational structures. Real-time quotes are calculated by package size, package weight, departing address, destination address, tracking, insurance. On the quotation page, you will see all the quotes and filter them depending on the type of freight by sea, air, or land. Search option is available in custom air and ocean freight software. All information can be presented in the table like company, freight type, departure, destination, weight, volume, status, actions. Generate freight quotes and send automatically generated rates for any transportation mode and keep track of quotation status.
- Networks:
You can find all the information about your warehouses or suppliers, can view or export it. Location and users will be displayed and a new location can be added with the help of add button. The network will show an overview of all parties you are doing business with connections, contacts, locations, etc.
- Reports:
The reports page has shipments, products, containers, and invoices tabs; it can instantly give a complete picture and a much better understanding of the business.
- Notifications:
It is a great way to communicate with the users and keep them updated with the happening in the system. It alerts users about recent events, updates, or reminders.
- Rates:
It helps in producing prices that depend on the transport mode road, air and sea. The distance to the delivery destination. Information about the price incurred by a carrier in moving goods, from one point to another under the terms of the contract. Freight rates and surcharges buttons are available.
- Accounting:
Get the ins and outs of freight accounting to better work with your departments and drive more value from transportation decisions. You can have commission management, invoices, and bills.
- GPS-trackers & location statistics apps:
Easy tracking and tracing of shipments of your package. It involves ensuring freight visibility and transparency. You can track vehicles as well as each package and container individually.
- Documentation:
Transport documents offers an accounting record of the transaction, instruction on where and how to ship the goods, and a statement giving instructions for handling the shipment. This feature allows you to know all the details about the shipper, the consignee, transportation service, any additional service, timing, and cargo details. All these documents are required to export and import goods swiftly and in an easy manner.
- Carrier selection:
For using a third-party carrier, you can pick the right one, establish rates, terms and expectations.
- Route optimization:
You can find the most efficient route and choose the transport mode(s) assigning vehicles, drivers and balancing the load in driver apps
What are the best freight forwarding software solutions?
Many complicated and interrelated functions have to consider, when you are working in freight forwarding software development, you can have several existing services in your stack so that you don’t have to build everything from scratch. Platforms like Hadoop, Big data, Apache, and flink are some of the leaders in terms of analytics. These stacks are on top of a cloud platform, that can be incorporated through the use of Microsoft Azure or Amazon web services. You can store all your information in database management software like MongoDB and Cassandra. PayPal and Stripe payment gateways can be used, Nexmo and Twilight offer an added sense of security for authentication and credentials. You can invest in third-party services to streamline the development process and offer a higher level of quality in the services that you need. Some of the best technology stacks used for integrating various features in custom software development for freight forwarders are as under
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Twilio: for authentication of credentials.
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Braintree & Paypal, Stripe: for payment gateways
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APNS for iOS. Firebase for Android and one single SDK for both- to trigger a notification.
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MongoDB, Postgresql-database requirement
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Firebase-real-time analytics
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AWS, Google. Azure, Digital Ocean-Cloud platforms
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Cost for development of custom air and ocean freight software
The cost estimation for customized freight software may vary in charges for different shipping logistics software development services companies. The following services are to be considered
When going for software development for the logistics industry
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Design
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Android and iOS development
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Backend development
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Web development
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Project management
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Quality Assurance
Apart from app development costs, the provision for miscellaneous expenses like support and maintenance and other charges are to be kept in mind. In the initial stage. The costs also depend on the technology stack used for the software. But the usage of the various technologies and time for the development also determine the cost of the software. Other factors include the amount of testing needed and technical considerations. Thus, many aspects contribute to the total costs of developing software for transportation software development companies.
If you’re willing to make your logistics business align with the market demand and your business goals, then it’s good to invest in freight forwarding software from SSTech System an experienced custom software development company for freight forwarders.