Softship.Commercial provides complete visibility and management of tariffs, contracts, quotations, contribution margins, booking and documentation, allowing you to manage your agents and offices to perform the day-to-day transactions required to deliver a quality service to your customers.
Softship.Commercial eliminates duplication of work, enhances booking controls and increases your billing accuracy through a faster and simplified revenue collection process. It also enables you to optimise your cargo mix, allocate space and equipment efficiently and enhance your overall level of customer service.
Long-term or volume-based agreements with customers are managed in any combination of location – including port-to-port or door-to-door – and for any type of cargo, including container, roro and breakbulk.
Flexible rates and automated ratings for each contract item can be offered and multiple cargo routing options can be maintained and compared to identify which is the most profitable and shortest option. Visibility of freight, charges, expenses and contribution for each contract item is clearly shown. Exceptional cargo (Out of Gauge or Dangerous Goods) are easily managed with relevant details and charges automatically applied. Similarly, discounts, free days for demurrage & detention are handled with ease.
This application also manages complex cargo quantity commitments and also ensures rates are applied across all relevant group companies of your client.
Full visibility, including various rounds of negotiation and changes are captured and stored and all contract data can be fully exported and imported from spreadsheets to simplify the often time-consuming rounds of negotiations with clients.
Short-term agreements and rate enquiries from customers are rapidly and easily managed by this application. All cargo types – container, roro, break-bulk and others – are catered for including dangerous goods, out of gauge and other special cargoes. Port-to-port and door-to-door supply chains (with an unlimited combination of ocean and inland legs) are managed seamlessly.
All applicable freight and other charges will be automatically added to the quotation allowing you to rapidly and accurately respond to the customer. Full visibility over all available routing options, including rates and transit times, will be highlighted allowing you to offer choice and the customer to select their preferred option. Special arrangements for detention and demurrage are easily managed.
Quotations are sent automatically to your customer with all relevant terms and conditions attached ensuring a fast and effortless quotation response with enhanced accuracy and visibility.
The often complex booking process is easily managed by this application through an intuitive user-interface to guide you through the process step-by-step. Independent of cargo type, it ensures all required information is provided during the booking acceptance. This includes FCL, LCL and non-containerised cargoes such as break-bulk and RoRo. Tight integration with the other Softship.LIMA applications means relevant data is automatically taken from the quotation or contract to avoid duplication and improve accuracy.
Softship.Booking will present you with all possible routing combinations for the selected cargo acceptance and delivery locations which will allow you to offer the best option to the client based on transit time, yield or income. You and your customers will be updated throughout the transit with a clear oversight on progress during the life-cycle of the booking. In the event re-routing of the cargo is required, the user is assisted to identify the best alternative with minimum overhead. For containerised cargoes, available equipment and the optimum release depots are presented and the software will support you to nominate the correct release depot.
To ease the documentation process, the software will automatically create bills of lading from the booking. More complex scenarios are also supported such as combining multiple bookings to a single B/L or splitting bookings to multiple B/Ls. The completion of a B/L will automatically create an invoice or queue the B/L within Softship.Finance. Similarly, booking confirmations, draft B/Ls and other relevant documents are automatically sent to customers.
This application allows you to manage intermodal transport chains from both the origin and destination perspectives. It gives your company the opportunity to boost revenue by adding a range of value-added services across the entire supply-chain.
Information is automatically and seamlessly exchanged with Softship.Booking to manage all modes of transport (such as truck, train and barge) incorporating multiple legs and waypoints.
Once a haulier has been nominated, the transport order is automatically sent to the vendor. Full visibility over the transport is achieved through on-demand status reports available throughout the life of the trip.
To simplify the paperwork, haulier expenses are estimated automatically based on agreed haulier contracts and these estimates are accrued in Softship.Finance for later haulier invoice reconciliation.