Geodis launches digital freight marketplace

‘Upply’ platform has been set up as a neutral supply chain service provider, open to the market in general, including competitors.

Geodis has announced the launch of its multimodal digital freight marketplace, ‘Upply’, which it claims will pioneer a more efficient and transparent supply chain market.

Designed along the lines of customer-centric and easy-to-use B2C sites, Upply invites shippers, forwarders and other logistics players to choose a mode of transport, followed by the number of pallets, containers or weight the shipment constitutes, and price per kilo sought. For air shipments, for example, requests can be fine-tuned to accommodate specific options such as airport-to-airport and door-to-door delivery.

A further click and prices appear on a scale ranging from green to red − from the least to the most expensive − the estimates being calculated on real transactions and updated regularly, Geodis said. Other features and options will be added gradually to the site.

While Upply offers another outlet for Geodis to sell its own freight transport solutions, the online marketplace has been set up as a neutral service provider, open to the market in general, including competitors – an aspect reinforced by the fact that it does not carry the group’s brand name.

“Upply’s neutral and transparent information provides a much-needed solution to the lack of flexibility and increasing complexity of contracting in the market that has frustrated both carriers and shippers,” the French group said.

The site’s ‘Smart’ feature dispenses instant freight quotes for air, sea and road (Europe and US routes only) freight shipments on up to 100,000 lanes, in addition to data-driven market insights.

However, while Upply is live now, the marketplace’s offer is for the moment limited to benchmark prices. It will only accept bookings from the middle of next year.

Upply is accessible at no cost for the next six months in order to reach a maximum of potential users and to demonstrate its utility, before becoming accessible by subscription, with prices ranging from €99 to €950 per month depending on the level of services offered and the number of requests.

Commenting on the launch of the digital marketplace, Upply’s CEO, Boris Pernet, said: “The supply chain industry is facing tremendous challenges. These problems highlight the need to reset the fundamentals so that the business potential of every player can be unleashed.

“Price volatility, information opacity, overbooking, last-minute cancellations, pressure on capacities and under-utilization are all market defects that hinder the market’s efficiency and its capacity to meet demand.”

He continued: “Upply was created to overcome these challenges by combining logistics expertise and data science. Eventually, Upply will be the marketplace for users to make informed decisions and generate fluid exchanges. It is founded on the principles of information transparency, control and flexibility”.

Geodis’ chairman and CEO, Marie-Christine Lombard, said the launch of Upply formed part of the French group’s two-fold global strategy of innovation and digital transformation:

“While continuing to digitize our core business and to invest in our strategic assets to enhance both customer experience and productivity, we capitalize on our experience as the pioneer in 4PL to take it one step further and create a true digital marketplace, meeting the demands of an increasingly fast-paced supply chain market.”

In the third annual ‘mystery shopper’ report by logistics technology company Freightos earlier this year, Freightos  said top freight forwarders’ ability to provide instant or rapid online quotes for new business was improving but still inadequate, with slow but steady improvement across the three years of surveys. For example, in launching its Shipa Freight platform this year, Agility joined Kuehne + Nagel to become only the second major forwarder to provide instant LCL quoting and the first for FCL.

It reported more progress with digital freight sales in the air than in the ocean freight business. Three top twenty forwarders now provide instant door-to-door air freight quotes, and two more are joining soon, it reported in March. Since its survey, Geodis also launched instant quoting and booking, for both air and ocean shipments, for existing customers, Freightos said.

Source: Lloyd’s