An outdoor-furniture importer was booking freight with the first forwarder who answered. We built a flow that sends one shipment brief to seven forwarders, parses their email quotes with AI, and lines them up by true landed cost — saving 9% on annual freight.
Typical results
12 hrs
Brief to comparison table
7
Forwarders competing per container
Figures reflect typical results for this kind of automation.
The challenge
Every container meant days of email ping-pong: requesting quotes, chasing replies, and decoding attachments where each forwarder formatted surcharges differently. Comparing offers fairly took four days, so the buyer usually asked two forwarders and took the faster answer. Nobody could say whether rates were competitive, and quote history lived in a crowded inbox.
Before and after
Hours from brief to comparison
−88%Forwarders quoted per shipment
3.5×Annual freight spend
−9%The automation
We built a Make scenario around a simple shipment brief — route, volume, ready date. One submission emails the brief to a panel of seven forwarders. As replies land, OpenAI parses each PDF and email into structured line items, converts currencies, and normalizes everything to total landed cost per container. The buyer receives one comparison table, picks the winner in a click, and the booking email goes out automatically with every quote archived.
How it works
- 01
One shipment brief
The buyer fills a short form — route, volume, ready date — and the brief emails itself to seven forwarders at once.
- 02
AI parses replies
As quotes land, OpenAI extracts freight, surcharges and local fees from every PDF and email format.
- 03
Normalize to landed cost
Currencies are converted and every offer is restated as total landed cost per container — finally comparable.
- 04
Pick in one click
The buyer reviews a single comparison table and selects the winner; the booking email goes out automatically.
- 05
Archive for leverage
Every quote is stored, building lane-by-lane benchmarks the importer uses in annual rate negotiations.
Starts from
- Shipment brief
- Forwarder email quotes
Delivers
- Landed-cost comparison table
- One-click booking
- Quote-archive benchmarks
The impact
Quote comparisons that took four days of emails now finish overnight — twelve hours from brief to table. Seven forwarders compete on every container instead of two, and annual freight spend dropped from roughly $210K to $191K, a 9% saving. The archived quotes now anchor the importer's yearly rate negotiations.
Questions about this automation
How does the AI read quotes that arrive in different formats?
Forwarders reply in PDFs, spreadsheets and plain email text. OpenAI extracts each line item, such as base freight, surcharges, local fees and validity dates, into a fixed structure. Currencies are converted at the current rate, and every offer is restated as total landed cost per container so the comparison is fair.
What happens if a quote is unclear or a forwarder does not reply?
If a quote is missing a required charge or the extraction is uncertain, that line is flagged for the buyer to check before the table is final. Forwarders who have not replied by a set deadline get an automatic reminder, and the comparison is sent with whatever quotes have arrived.
What is needed to get started?
The importer needs a list of forwarders and their email contacts, a short shipment brief form, and a mailbox the automation can read. It is a multi-step build, usually rolled out in stages: sending the brief and parsing replies first, then one-click booking and the quote archive used for benchmarks.