Freight News, Logistics

E-groupage portal moves into air and ocean

[ January 28, 2016   //   Chris ]

The Colo21 online groupage portal is now offering an air and ocean freight marketplace in addition to its road-based offering. Forwarders can now display their air and ocean trade lane offerings to shippers free of charge. As with the road product, forwarders’ offers are made visible to shippers who can contact forwarders via an integrated offer request tool.

Colo21 management board chairman Jörg Frommeyer, said: “We have already shown with groupage shipments that the system works. Now we are transferring this logic step by step to other modes of transport and supply chains.”

Initially, Colo21 will simply display air and ocean service but further services for these modes of transport are planned. The next step will be an online-booking tool, which would allow shippers to make every freight request and shipping order from one place, regardless of mode. For forwarders to would mean that all requests and orders come directly into the transport management tool, without the need to pick up data from other systems.

Meanwhile, the Colo21 road service has processed 850,000 shipments since its launch in March 2015 and, by the end of the year, 450 freight forwarders and transport companies had registered with the new service, offering services in 35 countries.

Frommeyer added: “We expect that the number of shipments will more than double in 2016.”

Colo21 says that, as well as helping operators to extend their range of services while reducing costs, transport companies can fill unused capacity on line hauls or in their distribution networks by offering them to forwarders via the portal.

“With our new air and ocean service we begin with the marketing capability and later we will add more tools to make production and administration easier, faster and more efficient,” said Frommeyer. During the second quarter of 2016 Colo21 will add an online-booking tool to facilitate this and speed up order management for both forwarders and shippers “and make the whole process easier and more transparent,” he said.

Colo21 will charge five Euros for each online-booking to the forwarder but simple display of services will remain free of charge for the users. From March, 2016 staff of Colo21 plans to call 3.000 shippers a month to explain how they can compare forwarding offers, get freight quotes and book their shipments online via the shipper portal.

Tags: Colo21