All whitepapers

Whitepaper · Freight / Logistics

More orders without more staff — with AI & Excel.

Expert guide for dispatch & sales in freight forwarding and logistics: why data work — not calculation — is the bottleneck in the quoting process, and how heterogeneous rate and tender data become a verified, comparable calculation basis. Sign up — you'll receive the whitepaper directly by email.

Cover More orders without more staff — with AI & Excel.
11 pages · Expert guide · Version 2.1 · June 2026
  • From Excel chaos to a price comparison

    Normalise carrier rates from emails, shared drives and Excel templates; assign surcharges such as BAF, PSS and GRI automatically.

  • Speed as a competitive edge

    At the same price, the fastest complete quote wins — speed comes from clean data.

  • NIS-2-compliant and data-sovereign

    Why public cloud AI is out of the question for rates and terms — and the sovereign alternative.

Executive summary

The German freight forwarding market is under considerable cost pressure: the Federal Office for Logistics and Mobility reports 2024 freight rates partly below profitability, and insolvencies in freight forwarding rose by 42.7 percent. At the same time, the quoting and tendering process often still runs manually via email and Excel: rate hunting in data silos, outdated surcharge tables, master comparisons in incompatible formats.

The guide shows why this costs so much time and margin — and how a data-sovereign approach turns heterogeneous rate and tender data into a verified, comparable calculation basis. Because at the same price, whoever delivers a complete, reliable quote first wins.

Numbers from the whitepaper

+42.7%more insolvencies in the freight forwarding sector in 2024BALM, Freight Market Monitoring, Annual Report 2024
74%of companies lag behind their own digitalisation relevance assessmentBVL Trend Study 2023/2024 (TU Hamburg, IPRI)
No. 1industry pain point: digitalisation of business processesBVL
Whitepaper: Logistics | MindsMachines