Freight Quote Automation Software for Forwarders

The RFQ Race Is Won in Hours, Not Days

A spot RFQ is a race with a hidden clock. The customer emailed you — and, usually, several of your competitors — at the same moment. The forwarder who comes back first with a credible, complete quote sets the anchor. Everyone who answers later is negotiating against it.

Yet in most forwarding operations, quoting is the slowest workflow in the building. An RFQ for FOB Shanghai to Jebel Ali sits in an inbox until someone opens it, re-types the details into a spreadsheet, emails three partners for buy rates, waits, chases, compares, applies margin by feel, formats a quote, and sends it. By then the clock has often already run out.

Zavin collapses that entire chain into one automated workflow. The RFQ is read the moment it arrives, priced against your live rate database, and answered as a branded quote — in under 30 seconds when rates are on file. Teams using this workflow cut RFQ processing time by up to 85%.

From RFQ Email to Branded Quote — The Full Workflow

Quote automation only works if it covers the whole job, not just the easy middle. Zavin handles every step between the inbound RFQ and the signed booking:

• •Extraction — origin, destination, Incoterm, equipment or dimensions, commodity, ready date, and special requirements are pulled from the email and its attachments into a structured request.
• •Rate collection — buy rates are pulled from your company-wide rate database; where none are valid, rate requests go out to your carriers and overseas partners automatically.
• •Comparison — collected rates are lined up side by side by carrier, transit time, validity, and total cost, so the best option is obvious rather than buried in a thread.
• •Margin — your target margin and pricing rules are applied per lane, customer, and mode, producing a sell rate you can defend.
• •Quote — a branded, professional quote document goes back to the customer under your identity, with terms, validity, and inclusions spelled out.
• •Follow-up — unanswered quotes are chased automatically on a schedule you set, so no opportunity dies of silence.

Extraction That Actually Understands Freight

Generic AI can find an origin and a destination in an email. Freight extraction is harder than that. The same RFQ might mix a CIF request with an FOB fallback, quote dimensions in centimeters for an air shipment that needs chargeable weight, or attach a packing list that contradicts the email body.

Zavin extracts like an operator reads: it understands Incoterms, distinguishes ocean FCL from LCL from air, computes volumetric weight for an AWB, resolves port codes and inland points, and flags anything ambiguous for a human instead of guessing. A quote built on a bad extraction is worse than no quote — so extraction is treated as the foundation, not a party trick.

Partner and Carrier Rate Collection, Handled

The most painful part of spot quoting is not the math — it is the waiting. For lanes where you buy through overseas agents or need a fresh carrier rate, someone has to write the rate request, send it to the right partners, chase the ones who go quiet, and compile whatever comes back.

Zavin does that loop itself. It sends structured rate requests to your chosen partners and carriers, reads the replies as they arrive, parses each quoted rate into the comparison, and nudges the ones still outstanding. Your pricing team stops being a mail-merge department and starts being a margin department.

Every rate collected this way also lands in your company-wide rate database — so the next RFQ on the same lane may not need to wait for anyone at all.

Margin Control and Approval Stay With You

Automated quoting without margin control is a fast way to sell freight at a loss. In Zavin, pricing rules are yours to define: target margins by lane, customer tier, and mode; floor prices the AI may never cross; and thresholds above or below which a quote must be approved by a named human before it goes out.

Quotes that fall inside your rules can go out automatically. Quotes that fall outside them are routed for approval, with the full rate comparison attached so the approver decides in seconds, not hours. Every quote — automatic or approved — is logged in a full audit trail: what was extracted, which rates were compared, what margin was applied, who approved it, and when it was sent.

Field-level access control applies across every object, branch, and country, so a branch manager in Dubai sees Dubai's margins and a pricing lead at head office sees everything.

Follow-Up That Never Lets a Quote Die

Most quotes are not lost — they are forgotten. The customer meant to reply, the salesperson meant to chase, and the lane went to whoever happened to follow up first. Zavin schedules the follow-up the moment a quote is sent, nudges the customer on the cadence you choose, and keeps the whole exchange in one thread with full context.

When the customer answers — a counter, a question, an acceptance — the platform recognizes which it is and routes it accordingly: reopening the negotiation, revising the quote, or converting it straight into a booking. Silence is the only outcome the workflow refuses to accept.

One Workflow, Connected to the Whole Operating System

Quote automation is not a standalone tool in Zavin — it is one organ in a connected system, and that is why it works. AI Email Automation is the front door: it reads every inbound message, recognizes the RFQs, and hands them to quoting already structured. Rate Intelligence is the fuel: every rate email your company has ever received is parsed into the database the quote engine prices from.

And when the customer says yes, the handoff continues. The confirmed quote becomes a shipment in Shipment Management — job file, documents, and milestones created with zero manual data entry. Win rates follow speed and completeness: pilot teams have seen quote win rates improve by 6 percentage points on this workflow.

Why a Legacy TMS Can't Quote Like This

A legacy TMS treats quoting as a form: a screen where a human types in details the email already contained, against rates a human already hunted down. The system records the quote; it does not produce it. Point quoting tools go one step further with rate lookups, but they still wait for a person to read the RFQ, key in the request, and copy the answer back into an email.

The bottleneck was never the form — it was everything around it: reading the email, extracting the details, collecting the rates, chasing the partners, applying the margin, sending the follow-up. Zavin automates the workflow, not the form. That is only possible because the platform owns the inbox, the rate database, and the quote engine as one system rather than three products taped together.

Live in Under 14 Days — Alongside What You Run Today

Quote automation deploys against your existing inboxes and your existing rate flow, so there is no migration and no IT project. Your pricing rules, margins, quote branding, and approval thresholds are configured in the first days; then live RFQs run through the workflow with your team reviewing every quote before it goes out. As confidence grows, you widen what sends automatically. Most teams are live in under 14 days.

Zavin works alongside CargoWise, Magaya, and whatever TMS you keep as your system of record. Nothing has to be replaced for quoting to get fast — the quotes just start winning while the rest of your stack stays put.