Carrier Rate Procurement

Improving the Procurement Process – Step by Step

Securing the best contract rates from carriers is critical but can be a time consuming process for companies. MercuryBid improves your procurement activities by giving you tools to make better and faster decisions.

These are the common steps in the procurement process

  1. Initial Activities
    • Define lanes in the scope of the bid
    • Select participating carriers
    • Create bid documentation
  2. Main Activities (Response Management)
    • Execute bid requests – Track responses – Respond to questions
    • Analyze responses
    • Select carrier rates by lane
  3. Final Activities
    • Notify participating companies of results
    • Create contracts and load TMS for execution

MercuryBid Simplifies Procurement

Initial Activities

The main MercuryBid bid screen puts all the necessary information to get started at your fingertips - organized into these five sections;

  1. General details
  2. Lane selection
  3. Carrier information
  4. Documents
  5. Actions

interface screen shot

1) Main MercuryBid interface with five sections

Bid Execution

Following the initial activities, MercuryBid executes the bid request and tracks responses. Simplified portals can be used to solicit bids from carriers. The list screen portal shows all current bids. The detail portal shows all bid information, document upload & download, and discussion threads.

interface screen shot

2) Two portals used for bid requests

As responses come in, you can perform detailed analysis and select the best responses by lane. In addition to the MercuryBid analysis interface shown below, you can drag and drop fields into pivot table report rows or columns and extract to Microsoft Excel.

interface screen shot

3) MercuryBid analysis interface showing top five rates for each lane, baseline rates and summary counts

Final Activities

When the analysis is complete, MercuryBid assists in notifying the contract winners and losers. At the same time, it’s easy to load the winning bid details to the TMS as contracts become available for executing shipments.

MercuryBid Basics

  • Customizable reports, documents and templates
  • A desktop application that shares data with the TMS
  • Updated automatically via connection to the TMS
  • Data is saved to your local hard drive
  • Spreadsheets are used for rating
  • Included with the MercuryGate TMS