Interview with
Mr. Adam Yaron
CEO
First, off Adam, tell us about the history of Freightools, and tell us about who owns this product?
Freightools is all about helping Freight Forwarding teams be more efficient and effective using digital tools. It is the next-gen SaaS solution for digital shipments!
White-labeled, Freightools has a branded set of tools that can turn any SME into a digital forwarder without substantial upfront investments or an in-house programming team.
Freight Forwarders still struggle with manual systems, weak visibility, and inefficiencies across their businesses. This is why Freightools has developed a set of tools that resolves these issues and offers the SME freight market these solutions to safeguard their future business across today’s global digital disruptors.
The company initially started as a project for digitizing a freight forwarding company in 2015. After the successful proof of concept, we decided to establish a company in Israel and hire the best R&D team from the startup nation to start developing a white-label, SaaS solution for SMB freight forwarders.
In 2018, Freightools (Powered By FAST) has successfully completed the acceleration program of the DOCK Innovation Hub, a vertical Venture Capital firm investing in and providing industry expertise to startups developing technologies for the ports, shipping and logistics sectors and supported by MAERSK, Wartsila, DSV, CARGOTEC and more.
The Freightools Beta product launched in late 2018, and as of today, Freightools has completed the transformation of more than 15 companies to become Digital Freight Forwarders!
There is a wide range of internet platforms in the market nowadays. Some might even say that the market is swamped. What makes your product stand out?
New, digital companies are transforming traditional freight and logistics as we know it. This includes digital freight forwarders such as Flexport, marketplaces like Cogoport, and digital strategies of industry giants such as Twill by MAERSK. Their offerings, built on big data, cloud, and connected digital technologies, give customers the seamless experience they already enjoy as consumers.
On the other hand, Freightools is White Label Software as a service that targets the long tail of the forwarding industry. With super FAST implementation, any freight forwarding company can turn digital and get immediate ROI due to Freightools economic pricing for onboarding and maintenance
Freightools includes full Digital TMS to manage any type of shipment digitally, from customer care, cargo visibility and sales proposals to operations, tracking and invoicing. This replaces the legacy, on-premise, core applications that were used for ages in Freight & Logistics, driving digital agility into the business.
Can users save time, and ultimately money, by using your platform?
Freightools can help freight forwarders save time and money using digital tools. Here are the key areas where freight companies building digital freight platforms on Freightools were able to do more with less:
1. Infrastructure cost reduction
Money spent on in-house development-related activities like software, server maintenance, travel, and consultant services was notably reduced by replacing the legacy, on-premise, core applications with the agile SaaS platform.
2. Reducing customer care expenses
Freight companies avoided adding to their operations headcount. Freightools allowed them to shrink ongoing customer care costs due to the automated customer alerting and cargo visibility systems.
3. User productivity increase
Freightools creates a “rocket effect” stream of business opportunities for the Global Freight Forwarder through Sales and Operations Optimization, using the most advanced Digital Collaboration Platform, able to cover all the end-to-end processes of a freight company.
4. A rise in sales team productivity
Organizations reported considerable business gains as a result of the higher productivity brought on by Freightools which enables simple connections, “1-To-Many”, with the Suppliers’ Network, rocketing forwarders’ competitiveness level in terms of price and time (1st success factor in their market), also using an Automatic Quotation System to eliminate waiting time.
Say that I am the owner of an SME freight forwarder, and I face competition from the global players in the market that often have their own brand, own IT department, and seemingly endless resources to interact digitally with customers. What can you do for me?
Like every business these days, SME freight companies must adopt digital technologies to compete in the digital age. Recent research clearly shows that if freight and logistics companies persist with the “business as usual” approach, traditional players can expect to lose both competitiveness and value.
Freightools has delivered a set of white-labeled, branded tools that resolve these issues and offers the SME freight market these solutions to safeguard their future business without substantial upfront investments or an in-house programming team, across today’s global digital disruptors.
Digital Disruption now threatens traditional freight companies with irrelevance unless they, too, learn to disrupt.
What prompted you to develop this digital tool, and how stable is it?
It started as an internal project to develop a new, digital customer portal and freight software system for the company I was working for back in 2015. Today, the system handles an average of 20,000 transactions per day. Many users are using the system for daily operations, eight hours a day, five days a week.
There is no free lunch, even online. Your product comes at a cost. What more can you tell us about that generally?
The standard pricing of Freightools Pro is currently an average monthly fee of USD80 per seat (Admin User) replacing the legacy, on-premise, core applications, which reduce the overall IT costs dramatically.
Due to the fact that more and more businesses are impacted by the spread of COVID-19 and are encouraging their employees to work from home, we want to do our part to help freight forwarders manage their freight business in these uncertain times. So, we have recently rolled out free access to Freightools digital shipment management capabilities to all the Freight Forwarding community globally, on first come, first served basis. Some of the tools are:
- Branded digital freight forwarding app
- Online quotations & booking including rate management system
- Real-time container and air cargo Track&Trace within the digital freight app
- Centralized paperwork system with secured storage of up to 5GB
- BI dashboards and automated reporting system
These features (only available in Freightools PRO) will be available to all new customers until September 1, 2020.
We’re committed to supporting the Freight Forwarding community during this challenging time and are continuing to scale our API and infrastructures to support higher demand, ensuring streamlined, reliable access to the service throughout this period.
Shipping and freight forwarding consist of many parties working together—trucking companies, shipowners, freight forwarders, surveyors, shippers, consignees, customs, etc. Would you say that your digital tool is aimed at mainly freight forwarders in the market or a different sector?
Freightools was built after over four decades of collective experience in freight forwarding. We are a team of experts set out to safeguard the likes of the small to medium enterprise forwarding businesses and to enable them to compete with the various disruptors in the industry.
The system includes access for other parties like shippers, consignees, truckers, warehouses, etc., but the access is usually free as collaborators with the freight forwarding company.
We are almost midway through 2020. Tell us about the rollout of your product and your plans for this year.
Our plans for 2020 are to introduce low touch product features such as wizards and in product salespeople for some tools. This will give more and more freight companies (struggling to adjust to digital disruption) the keys to a variety of new, customer-centric business models, each of which could unlock significant value-generation opportunities.
How is it best to reach you?
The best way to reach us is via email.
General company email: info@freightools.com
Adam Yaron: adam.yaron@fast-technologies.com
