Are you a logistics business looking for an automated system to manage your shipment, cargo planning, RFP process, and more? The solution to your problem is custom freight broker software!
When businesses expand globally, freight shipping has become common in today’s competitive world. Regardless of their size, logistics and supply chain companies are investing in a freight broker solution to automate their freight process. In fact, the freight broker software development market has crossed the mark of 10.76 billion and is expected to reach 17.45 Billion by 2023! Intrigued?
So, when the world is leveraging the advanced benefits of freight broker software, why are you lagging? Here’s how you can implement a custom freight broker solution in your company. But, before proceeding to the development part, let’s cover the basics!
What is Freight Broker Software?
Freight broker software is a robust logistics solution streamlining freight movement and delivery. A dedicated freight broker solution can easily automate various processes, including shipment tracking, dispatching, carrier selection, carrier audits, document management, and regulatory compliances.
Not just that, but comparing the carrier rates in real-time, storing the products, client networking, and handling the shipments in multiple transport modes is also possible with freight broker software.
Need to know more advantages of a robust freight broker solution? Click the link below to explore the endless benefits of implementing a custom freight broker solution in your logistics company!
4 Steps to Get Started with Freight Broker Software Development
Here’s how you can launch a business-specific custom freight broker software in no time! Do you already have ideas for your project? Fill out our form to schedule a free consultation right away!
Define Your Business Requirements
The first and foremost step for freight broker software development is understanding and defining your business requirements. You must clearly understand your business operations, from cargo planning to shipment and carrier selection.
You should know what operations need to be optimized and what can work without automation. For instance, do you need to automate the carrier selection process, or do you need real-time information about your freight movements? Once the requirements are listed, you should carefully plan a business strategy to automate your critical tasks.
List the Key Features to Include in Custom Freight Broker Software
Features and design are the two most critical aspects that can impact your project. You must decide on basic and advanced features to help you achieve your business automation goals.
Now, you can either research by yourself or connect with a reputed freight broker software development company like ours to get best-in-class features for your software. Here are some modules that you can include in your freight broker solution.
- Shipment Tracking
Real-time shipment visibility has become crucial in today’s digital era. Customers and logistics partner needs to know the current status of their products. Hence, with a shipment tracking module, you can locate the actual location of your drivers and carriers. With the exact location of the cargo, your customers can know the time for final delivery. That would build trust for your company while eliminating unusual traffic and calls on your number.
- Freight Audits and Invoicing
Another crucial feature of a successful freight broker software is freight audit and digital invoicing. Manually generating multiple documents, including bill of lading, proof of delivery, and rate confirmation may consume a lot of time for your employees.
Furthermore, managing the invoices for various partners is also a difficult task. That’s why you need to have a dedicated billing module that can generate automated invoices and update your logistics company accounts. You can also perform internal audits with this feature.
- Load Management
It is essential to have a complete list of loads, including the type of transportation used for them, the size of carriers, and their rate. However, manually checking all these things time and again is a daunting task. That’s why we suggest our clients include a dedicated load management module that can automatically provide all those information with a click.
- Customer Portal
With a customer portal, you can easily connect with your customers. Whether a complete list of the products to be supplied to specific warehouses or sharing the real-time status of the products, a customer portal can automate many things for you. Besides, you can also implement chatbot functionality that can automate your customer support process.
- Rate Engine
The rate engine module integrates the rates from various brokers and carriers and creates a centralized list. You can access that list to choose the most suitable carrier for your product shipment. The list gets updated every time the carrier updates its rate.
- Document Management
Handling shipments across the countries can be troublesome if you are unaware of the international rules and regulations. That’s where the document management portal comes into play! With this feature, you can easily know the compliances of various countries and even generate shipment bills and documents according to their rules.
Explore more exciting features and services for your freight broker software by clicking the link!
Choose a Credible Software Development Company
Choosing a development partner for your freight broker software development can be the most demanding job. That’s because only an experienced software development company can offer distinguished software capable of handling modern-day challenges.
With a reputed company, you can get plentiful experienced resources for your project anytime throughout the development. Moreover, those experienced developers will also have complete knowledge of the latest market trends that can add value to your custom solution. Not to mention, 24/7 technical assistance, a comprehensive development package, and easy scaling of the resources per your needs are some extra perks of selecting an experienced freight broker software development company like Matellio.
Test and Deploy Your Project
The final step for freight broker software development is to test your solution. Many companies often skip this crucial step of testing their digital product. After the development, they directly deploy the solution to their choice of platform. As a result, they experience glitches only after a few days of deployment.
We are sure you do not want that for your enterprise solution! That’s why we recommend you opt for software testing for your custom freight broker solution. At Matellio, you can choose between manual and automated testing according to your business requirements. Once the testing is done, you need to deploy your solution on a cloud platform or local server according to your choice.
Other Factors that Can Impact Your Freight Broker Software Development
So, you have decided to move on with custom freight broker software development. You may have found the perfect software development company and have analyzed your business requirements. But, wait! You need more to know for a successful freight broker solution.
Conduct Market Research and Competitor Analysis
Knowing the latest market trends has become crucial for successful enterprise software development. You need to understand trends in the market, technologies, or new development frameworks. Besides that, competitor analysis is equally important for successful custom software development.
There is no harm in knowing what your competitors are doing and how they achieve their automation goals. Hence, you should choose a software development partner to help you with in-depth research and analysis. At Matellio, we offer all our clients free competitor analysis and market research services. You can fill out our form to leverage our free offerings.
UI/UX is Important
Besides features, if there’s anything that can greatly impact your freight broker software development, it’s UI/UX. To those new to the software engineering market, UI refers to the user interface, and UX refers to the user experience.
In short, the simple screens, intuitive buttons, ease of exploring your software, and the ease of accessing certain features results in better UI. That enhances the user experience and makes your software user-friendly. Hence, try to invest heavily in hiring the best UI/UX designers for your freight broker software. An experienced software development company will easily offer you professional designers, for your project.
Read More: Top 7 Tips to Hire the Best UI/UX Designer
Always Begin with an MVP
MVP stands for a minimum viable product. In short, it is a prototype built according to your selected features and design. With an MVP, you can know what your product will look like and how it will function without developing the solution. You can change its features and designs, add new buttons, or even alter its functioning without spending many resources.
Hence, as a leading software engineering studio, we always recommend our clients to begin their projects with an MVP. with that, they can exactly know what their product would look like, and thus the testing phase can be shortened.
Expert Consultation is Useful
Last but not least, consulting with an expert before initiating your freight broker software development can be very useful for you. That’s because an expert would know what is trending in the market, how other companies are doing it, and what all features could make your digital product unique.
Besides that, they can also guide you in selecting the most appropriate technologies and tools that can further elevate your product development process. Hence, always opt for a software development company that offers expert consultation service as a part of software development.
That’s Where Matellio Comes In!
With decade-long experience in custom software development and access to the best next-gen technologies, Matellio can help you with your freight broker software development. You can get a comprehensive range of software development services, from expert consultation and market analysis to MVP creation, app development, software development, UI/UX, testing, and even next-gen tech integration.
Whether you need a dedicated mobile app, or a custom solution working on the cloud platform, we can help you with all your business requirements. Plus, you can also get a no-obligation quote matching your project requirements. So, why wait when you can start today? Fill out our consultation form to get a free no-obligation quote for your project right away!
