How a global automotive manufacturer secures below-market rates across ocean and air 

A global automotive freight network across ocean and air, with no single independent benchmark spanning both modes.

This manufacturer runs a complex global freight operation covering finished vehicle components, production material, and after-sales parts across ocean and air. With five-year tender cycles, multi-regional carrier networks, and freight decisions spread across procurement, network planning, and finance, the team needed a single independent data source that could serve all functions simultaneously.

The challenge was twofold. On the ocean side, understanding how contracted rates compared to the market, corridor by corridor and carrier by carrier, required more granularity than the market provided. On the air side, with forwarder-procured rates on 22 lanes across global clusters, the team needed to distinguish genuine rate competitiveness from forwarder margin.

During periods of acute market volatility: Middle East disruption, rapid BAF movements, blank sailing increases, the absence of real-time independent data made it difficult to advise leadership, validate carrier claims, or time tender decisions with confidence.

How Xeneta Helped

A full ocean and air intelligence suite, deployed across procurement, planning, and data integration.

The manufacturer uses Xeneta's Ocean and Air platforms, giving all teams across procurement, network planning, and finance enterprise-wide access to the full breadth of market intelligence: ocean and air market rates, carrier spread, surcharges, schedule reliability, transit times, airport and regional capacity, load factors, and blank sailing data.

Tender benchmarking data is central to both ocean and air RFQ cycles, enabling the team to run bids against market benchmarks lane by lane and identify where incumbent or forwarder pricing diverges from what the market supports. Six-month forward rate outlook and budget modelling tools allow the team to model future cost exposure and advise leadership during volatile periods without relying solely on carrier-provided forecasts.

Spend benchmarking and industry peer comparison data give the team context on how their overall freight cost position compares to peers, critical for internal reporting and for justifying procurement strategy to management. Schedule on-time performance and transit time data are actively used by the network planning team to evaluate carrier service quality independently of carrier self-reporting.

How It Works

From tender preparation to carrier performance monitoring: Xeneta is embedded across the full procurement and planning cycle.

Before each tender round, the team uses Xeneta to establish internal target rates by lane, assess market positioning, and understand where the market is heading. During RFQ evaluation, tender benchmarking data allows direct comparison of incoming bids, both ocean and air, against market benchmarks, identifying where specific carriers or forwarders are pricing above or below what the data supports. On the air side, shipper buying rate and airline selling rate data enable the team to compare forwarder-procured prices against what airlines are actually selling capacity for, revealing margin structures that were previously opaque.

Post-contract, the platform is used across two distinct teams. The procurement team monitors rate performance against market benchmarks throughout the contract period, tracking where rates have drifted relative to the market and building the case for mid-term renegotiations. The network planning team uses schedule on-time performance and transit time data as neutral KPIs to evaluate carrier service commitments, validate tender responses, and support a programme to consolidate multiple carrier data platforms into a single source of truth via API integration.

Outcomes

Independent intelligence driving better decisions across ocean, air, and network planning.

The Broader Impact

Why a single independent platform matters for a multi-modal, multi-team freight operation.

For a manufacturer operating at this scale, with ocean and air freight tendered separately across different teams and different cycles, the value of a shared data platform compounds with every additional use case. Each team using the same, independent freight intelligence source, whether for rate negotiation, service evaluation, or forwarding, creates a consistent standard across functions that supplier-provided data cannot replicate.

That consistency is especially valuable during volatile market periods, where independent data is the difference between reacting to carrier claims and responding with evidence. The platform's scope across rate benchmarking, capacity intelligence, schedule reliability, surcharge data, and market forecasting means that as new challenges arise, the data to address them is already in place.