New Catapult product aimed at mapping carrier/forwarder RFQ

   The freight rate software company Catapult International on Thursday launched a new bid and request for quotation (RFQ) data mapping solution for ocean carriers, airlines and freight forwarders.
   The product, called Spring Board, is designed to allow forwarders and carriers to processes freight rate bids and RFQs with little up-front effort, algorithms homogenizing different formats so that it fits into the receiving party’s format or database.
   This data-mapping process allows the user to “auto rate” against buy, sell or margin rates as well as split out to other regional users to complete.
Spring Board also tracks all activities of the bid completion process, including version control and deadline visibility, and serves as a centralized platform to host the ocean and air freight tenders.
   “Spring Board was created because many of our freight forwarder customers received bids from shippers with more than 1,000 lines, and a majority of their trade procurement time was spent formatting the bids in their format or just filling it out by hand,” said Bryan Luttrell, chief operating officer at Catapult. “Our BETA users have realized a significant amount of time savings by using Spring Board.”
   Spring Board also provides a managed mapping solution called KickStart, where the user uploads the bid and Catapult personnel maps it for them within 24 hours.
   “This option allows the trade-lane pricing managers to work on analyzing profit margins,” Catapult said. “Future plans in Spring Board will feature the ability for importers and exporters to communicate with their freight vendor to negotiate RFQ’s and bids online.”
   In a conversation last month about Spring Board, Catapult Chief Executive Officer Matt Motsick said the company has spent the last year developing the product.
   “We had an RPF tool which crunches multiple lanes, but it couldn’t go back to customer’s format,” he said. “We want to read the customer’s headers, map it to the database headers, auto rate, and spit it out to customers’ format. That’s the big pain point for forwarders and carriers — spending all this time manually entering it into customer’s format.”