QCS maintains eye-level with global giants by deploying cargo.one as its first all-in-one rate management solution

“As an SMB freight forwarder, cargo.one acts as our innovation team…Our future looks strongest if we partner with cargo.one.” – Nico Haltmayer, Director of Sales & Development 

Gaining seamless and reliable Rate Management and Agent Rates with cargo.one, has enabled QCS-Quick Cargo Service to greatly accelerate its quoting speed, bid for more shipments with increased confidence than before, and boost its competitive edge.

Challenges

• Quoting every shipment competitively and accurately at speed
• Remaining competitive versus larger forwarders with branches around the world

Celebrating its 50th Anniversary this fall, QCS-Quick Cargo Service is a thriving multimodal logistics provider. Including second and third generations of freight experts, the company has an impressive footprint across 11 European countries. Its success is no accident – the company has remained firmly on the pulse of changing demand and embraced innovation in how it operates, explains Nico Haltmayer, its Director of Sales & Development.

QCS and cargo.one: pioneers for digital transformation

“I knew cargo.one even before it really knew itself”, jokes Nico. In founding the company, cargo.one’s team spent time in QCS branches during a peak season to study the expert forwarder’s workflows and protracted telephone negotiations for securing air cargo capacity. cargo.one shared Nico’s frustration with time-consuming offline practices and in 2018, QCS became an early adopter and customer number three out of many thousands.

Nico was motivated to take an ambitious technological route and future-proof the business as his predecessors had done in the decades past. Today, QCS teams book the majority of all air shipments with cargo.one, valuing the usability and “fantastic support” that the platform delivers. Nico also points to the strength of cargo.one’s airline integrations as another differentiator: “We believe that cargo.one is ahead of other platforms”. 

The switch to digital has been transformative for the business: “Because every shipment should ideally be quoted quicker than 30 minutes, cargo.one has helped us massively, allowing us to get rates within seconds. This also supported us to expand our business into new areas like the time-critical market”, he adds. 

Success with cargo.one led QCS teams to join the designing and development of cargo.one pro – providing access to digital agent-to-agent bookings, a first for the industry, as well as advanced rate management functionality. Nico sees value in QCS being at the forefront of digital freight: “cargo.one is a real innovation partner for us, we feel part of the development of pro and we really appreciate that”. 

QCS wins shipments based on delivering attractive quotes at high speed. Because cargo.one adds 1-2 additional airlines per month, Nico recognizes how this further supports QCS’ business growth: “The proportion of our bookings that are digital grows with every new carrier that cargo.one adds. We believe we will be able to soon quote 95% of ad hoc shipments with the platform.”

‍Effortless all-in-one rate management

Even while benefiting from digital booking, QCS was still held back by slow and manual methods to centrally manage its rates. Daily rate setting was slow and complicated, with teams pulling together rates from diverse sources such as “Excel, PDF and email files”. Nico explains why rate management began to grow in importance: “Not all quotations are done with live rates – some competitive airlines require using standard rates. It was pretty tough. We had to work with different resources, screens, softwares.”

QCS required an all-in-one, digital rate management solution that offered a comprehensive and consolidated view of all relevant rates including rate sheets, promo, dynamic and QCS’ own contract rates which have been uploaded. Nico explains, “Over the years, we checked out a number of platforms – cargo.one stands out”. 

The result for QCS has been a transformation in quoting efficiency, with cargo.one replacing the vast majority of previous sources like Excel sheets, databases, and PDFs. Nico’s teams can now locate standard and special rate types in seconds rather than hours: “The quotation speed has been raised, probably ten times faster, that’s the reality”. QCS can also download data from cargo.one at any time to feed any process.

cargo.one pro’s live estimate rates provide a scientifically substantiated estimate of the best market rate for a shipment at a given time. QCS teams can complement live rates in the shorter term with live estimates as valuable guidance for the longer term. Nico believes that live estimates sharpened QCS’ ability to quote far out with confidence: “Before live estimates we would tend to put a margin on top to safeguard against potential rate increases. We don't have the same one-year contract rates as the bigger players, and this meant sometimes we wouldn’t compete because it was too risky. Live estimates give us a chance now to confidently bid for shipments we wouldn't have before”. 

“I was blown away. I have tender biddings on my table and it’s very hard for us to guess where the market will be in three or six months. cargo.one has a massive amount of data and brings that numerical guidance to give us more confidence on the rates to quote. It’s improving our chances of winning – it’s a big advantage”.

Harnessing ‘local heroes’ with Agent Rates 

cargo.one’s Agent Rates delivers forwarders like QCS around-the-clock access to rates and local charges from trusted forwarders in cargo.one’s global community. Previously, QCS agents could spend up to multiple days exchanging emails across time zones. With Agent Rates, QCS has gained not only speed but also more competitive rates: “Before, it often took us two days, so we have significantly accelerated that now. With some partners we only had access to standard rates, above the market.” QCS now competes far more flexibly using an expansive range of up to date agent rates.

‍“cargo.one’s Agent Rates makes us as powerful as a K&N, DB Schenker, or DHL. We can be a smaller company with a network of agents across the globe – the exact advantage and strength that much larger forwarders use."

QCS is benefiting from a de facto network of forwarders who use cargo.one globally. He points to the strategic value that shippers and consignees gain from these “local heroes”: “In many markets like Thailand or Bangladesh, the larger forwarders are not the top options – the smaller, local heroes are – it’s the knowledge, history, relationships that makes them strong. These smaller players can now use digital platforms like cargo.one to group together, and leverage each other to deliver the strongest solution for every shipment. So cargo.one helps smaller forwarders to get stronger in time”.

In the same way QCS uses cargo.one's Agent Rates to find overseas partners, it also sells services to agents using cargo.one around the world with its own online portal thanks to cargo.one Storefront. Nico comments, “We often have shipments booked overnight and we are definitely happy to see they have booked without expending any team resources.” 

A bright future for tech-enabled forwarders

Nico is conscious of the industry-level impacts of digital quoting and booking. He is relieved that adoption is now growing fast: “From my experience of the past 10 years, I saw a lot of industries dying that didn’t embrace technology, but in freight forwarding I am now seeing shifts. The companies that have put focus into digital will emerge on top in the next five years” 

Partnering with cargo.one has enabled QCS to remain future-proofed and resilient in a volatile and cyclical air transport industry. Nico reflects upon the strategic role that cargo.one fulfills for QCS: “We are a mid-sized company. We rely on companies like cargo.one to be our innovation team and this is where I value our collaboration. We have a demand from the market that we cannot achieve ourselves, while cargo.one has the resources. It’s a fantastic give and take between forwarders like QCS and cargo.one – we profit from each other.”

Reflecting on his long-standing collaboration with cargo.one, Nico says, “I am proud that cargo.one is leading this digitalization of air freight. I’m happy that we have such a team on the global stage”. With access to the expanding opportunities of digital air freight, he is confident that QCS will celebrate again in another 50 years: “A new age of logistics is well on the way”.