If your procurement strategy still revolves around a single annual tender, you’re not managing freight costs — you’re managing the gap between what you locked in and what the market is actually doing.
I’ve had this conversation with enterprise procurement teams more times than I can count. The annual RFP rhythm made sense for a long time. But as I said in a recent webinar: “The 12-month cycles that tenders are currently having can actually not deal with the changes in the market.”
Today, BAF surcharges can swing 15–25% within a single quarter. Geopolitical events reshape trade lanes overnight. And yet most procurement teams are still trying to manage this volatility with a process designed for a much calmer era.
The Problem With Treating Procurement as an Annual Event
What I see most often is this: organizations react to market trends rather than getting ahead of them. They see what’s happening, go out and do their tender, keep their existing strategies — and then deal with the consequences. Higher prices. More workload. Teams chasing carriers across spreadsheets and disconnected systems.
The real issue isn’t that annual tenders are wrong. It’s that on their own, they’re too slow for a market that moves faster than the contract cycle. When the market shifts, most teams have three options: ignore it, react informally through ad-hoc renegotiations, or build a repeatable way to realign rates with reality. The third is what agile procurement is designed to solve.
What Agile Procurement Actually Means in Practice
When I talk about agile procurement, I’m not talking about doing more tenders. It all comes down to three things: standardize and automate your workflows, benchmark against what’s actually happening in the market, and adjust — not just fuel prices and carrier rates, but your broader strategy. Being on top of the market instead of reacting to it.
In practice, the teams getting this right have stopped treating procurement as something they “do in Q1” and started treating it as an ongoing discipline that runs year-round.
Here are the 5 steps I recommend to get started:
Step 1: Get Your Data in Order
Everything else in agile procurement depends on this. As I often say to customers: procurement data — all our data — that’s the heart of everything. Without good data, you cannot do anything. You cannot act accordingly.
If your rate data is scattered across spreadsheets, carrier emails, and disconnected systems, you can’t move quickly — and neither can your carriers. Developing a standardized, customizable rate card format ensures every carrier submits comparable information. Centralizing this in a cloud-based platform gives all stakeholders real-time access to a single source of truth.
Step 2: Automate Everything That Doesn’t Require Human Judgment
Manual freight procurement is costing your team time it doesn’t have. RfQ generation, carrier invitation, rate card validation, sanity checks, best-rate calculations — none of these require human judgment. They require consistency, speed, and accuracy.
With Freightos Procure, you define your RfQ templates once, and for the next RfQ, you can just launch it within minutes. The carrier invitations, the reminders, the sense checks on whether the data is correct — all that workload that is done manually, often across Teams chats and master Excel spreadsheets — all of that is taken away.
That’s also where the nature of the work changes. Instead of spending days copying and reconciling numbers, procurement professionals spend more time on the things only they can do: balancing cost with service and risk, explaining trade-offs to internal stakeholders, and building more strategic carrier relationships.
Step 3: Know What the Market Is Actually Paying
One of the most common gaps I see in enterprise freight procurement is the absence of reliable, independent benchmarking data. Most teams know roughly where their rates sit — but not precisely how they compare to what the market is actually paying across their specific lanes.
What I see a lot is enterprise shippers simply comparing their existing pre-qualified carriers against each other. They’re launching their RfQ with their carrier database and just looking at the rates. But what’s really important is that you’re looking also at the market — especially when you see how it’s changing. If you’re not looking at the market, you might miss that there is an increase coming, and then you align with a carrier on one-year rates — and the market changes, the fuel prices change, and you end up paying on top even if something different was agreed.
Freightos Terminal gives procurement teams daily-updated spot and contract benchmarks across ocean and air, sourced from over $50 billion in real commercial freight spend. But what I find particularly powerful is the forecasting capability — we give a forecast for up to six months, predicting how the market is actually changing. That’s helping you to tailor your strategy to how the market will be reacting before you see it, so you can prepare accordingly and save money.
Step 4: Run Regular Mini-Bids and Track What’s Working
Annual contracts alone can’t keep pace with market volatility. The teams seeing the biggest procurement gains have moved to a model where they run structured mini-bids on volatile lanes throughout the year — not just at annual tender time.
The logic is straightforward. Because we’re so fast with running RfQs and launching tenders, you can actually check what’s going on, how the market is moving, and decide not to tender your entire pack of lanes. You can look at where the market is going, what your forecasting is saying. Is it going down? Makes sense to tender in that region. Are prices going up? It might make more sense to extend your rates with your existing carriers.
With Freightos Procure, you look at it, you see a recommendation from the tool, you go in, you tender, and within six minutes or less, your mini-bid is on the market and your carriers can work with it.
One question I get often is whether to commit to fixed rates for a full year or stay more flexible. My view: I would always recommend to stay flexible. With a one-year contract in place, you always have to renegotiate if anything happens. I would rather go into something more transactional that you can handle disruptions with more easily.
I also think about it like a portfolio. You should not invest only in one stock. It’s really good to spread the volumes — have some spot, have some mini-bids, have some RfQs. Make sure your network is still running.
Step 5: Don’t Let Fuel and BAF Become a Passive Cost
This is the area where I see most enterprise procurement teams leaving the most money on the table.
Fuel is one of the biggest cost drivers — not just lately, but in general. And the reality is that even if you have an annual contract, during the year the fuel prices can change dramatically. In January you can have a fuel price that is X, and five months later it can go up significantly. It’s really important that all of that is in your rate and that you can always track it back — because then you can also justify it internally.
That’s why at Freightos we developed a feature that can automatically trigger workflows and update fuel prices with your carriers. You can decide if you want to be the one steering that process, or if you actually ask your carriers to update the fuel. The setup is straightforward — for example, if the index is growing by 5%, trigger the update and adjust the fuel price by 3.5%. You set it up once and then it runs automatically in the background. You just need to see what was changed, approve it, and you can bring in indices from wherever you want — for example, the jet fuel index for air freight.
Combined with Freightos Terminal’s real-time market intelligence and the Freightos Baltic Index (FBX), procurement teams can keep fuel costs anchored to actual market conditions year-round — without the overhead of a full renegotiation every time the market moves.
What Changes When You Get This Right
When I talk to teams that have made this shift, a few things consistently come up.
- Finance conversations become easier. Instead of defending why your January forecast missed a market shift in August, you can show how your rates track benchmarks over time — and where you chose to lock in versus stay flexible.
- Carrier relationships improve. A procurement team that brings data, clarity, and a predictable cadence to negotiations is more attractive than one that disappears for a year and then demands a major rate cut with 10 days’ notice.
- Procurement becomes more credible internally. When your sourcing rhythm matches the market’s rhythm, it’s much easier to defend both your costs and your strategy to finance and operations leadership.
A Simple Way to Start
You don’t need a multi-year transformation to begin. Start by auditing where your team’s time actually goes — how much of it is spent on manual rate card validation, carrier chasing, and BAF reconciliation? That’s your baseline.
Pick one area and run it properly for one quarter. If it delivers better outcomes with less manual overhead, you have a proof point. The goal isn’t to do more procurement events. It’s to stop making one big, brittle annual bet and start managing freight costs as if market volatility is the norm — because it is.
Download our 5-step playbook to see exactly how leading enterprise procurement teams are making the shift.
Enterprise Account Manager, Freightos
