Freight procurement, automated: rate-card digitization, contract parsing, multi-carrier bidding, freight audit

Freight procurement is where a meaningful share of enterprise freight spend quietly leaks. Shipsy closes the leak by treating procurement as one continuous digital pipeline — rate-card parsing, contract management, multi-carrier bidding, and freight audit — all feeding into the same engine, with Nexa running settlement and Vera handling disputes.

This post is for heads of freight procurement in freight-forwarding, FMCG, and 3PL businesses still running the procurement lifecycle across four different tools and two spreadsheet tabs.

Why we built this

Most freight procurement lives in three disconnected places. Rate cards arrive as PDFs and are rekeyed into a TMS or Excel. Contracts live in legal’s document repository with effective dates nobody in operations can see. RFP cycles happen once a year, not once a lane. Freight audit runs in a BPO, after the fact, with a multi-month resolution cycle.

Each handoff is where leak happens — a rate tier missed, a surcharge misapplied, a lane that should have been re-RFP’d six months ago, a dispute that was never opened because nobody had time. Shipsy’s Freight Procurement module was built to collapse those four silos into one pipeline.

How it works

Four modules, one data spine, continuous operation.

1. Rate-card digitization

Carrier rate cards arrive in every format imaginable — PDFs, Excel tabs, screenshots of emails. Shipsy parses them into a structured schema: origin-destination, service level, weight/volume breaks, accessorials, fuel surcharge formulas, effective dates, contractual commitments. The parser handles multi-tab spreadsheets and non-standard layouts because enterprise carrier rate cards never conform. Every digitized card is versioned so historical shipments always price against the rate card in effect on their ship date.

2. Contract parsing and policy extraction

Contract documents go through a clause-level parser that extracts service-level commitments, volume commitments, termination clauses, price-review triggers, and surcharge entitlements. The output links directly to the rate card — so the TMS, freight audit, and billing all know what the contract actually allows, not what the spreadsheet implies.

3. Multi-carrier bidding and RFP cycles

For lanes where procurement wants live competition, Shipsy runs mini-RFPs and carrier bids. Carriers submit through a portal; bids feed the multi-carrier allocation engine with performance history already scored. Enterprise RFP cycles compress from quarters into weeks because the data spine is already digital.

4. Freight audit, closed-loop

Nexa audits every invoice against the digitized rate card and contract. Discrepancies hand off to Vera for autonomous dispute resolution. The result is continuous freight audit — every invoice, every lane — rather than the sampled, delayed audit a BPO delivers.

The pipeline compounds. The better the rate-card parsing, the cleaner the invoice audit. The better the audit, the stronger the next RFP. The stronger the RFP, the tighter the contract. Each loop improves the next.

Here’s the procurement cycle at a glance:

flowchart LR A[RFQ launch] --> B[Carrier bids] B --> C[Bid evaluation] C --> D[Rate card digitized] D --> E[Contract parsed] E --> F[Live allocation] F --> G[Invoice audit Nexa] G --> H{Discrepancy?} H -->|Yes| I[Vera disputes] H -->|No| J[Pay + close] I --> A J --> A

Early results

Heineken’s $25M+ in autonomous dispute resolution via Vera is the anchor proof point, and it runs on this procurement spine. The same customer also logged a 28% reduction in LSP excessive-stay payments and 70%→90% route settlement automation. FMCG and freight-forwarding customers typically identify a meaningful share of addressable freight leak inside the first quarter post-deployment. RFP cycle time compresses sharply once rate-card digitization is complete, because the status-quo tool chain is so manual.

The second-order benefit is audit coverage. Customers move from auditing a sampled slice of invoices (what a BPO economically justifies) to auditing every invoice (what a digital pipeline enables).

What’s next

The next iteration adds carrier-facing rate-card self-service — carriers submit updates directly, Shipsy validates and versions them, and the change propagates through allocation, audit, and billing on publish. This removes the lag between a rate change and its application, and is rolling out with select design partners.