You automate freight quotes from email with software that reads the rate request in your inbox, finds the rates, adds your margin and drafts the reply. Your sales rep checks the draft and sends it. With nemox, a quote is ready in 3 seconds instead of about 28 minutes by hand.
This guide explains how freight quote automation works, what stays with your team and what results a forwarder saw in practice.
How long does a freight quote take today?
By hand, quoting one air freight shipment takes about 28 minutes. Booking it takes another 17 minutes. With many requests a day, that adds up fast.
Take Cargo Movers, a forwarder founded in 1998 with about 85 employees. Around 200 quote requests reach its shared sales inbox every working day. That is about 6,000 a month. 4 people worked on that inbox. Each one answered around 40 requests a day, close to the limit of what a person can do when every quote is built by hand.
Why is quoting from email so slow?
The work itself is not hard. The problem is that the data sits in many places:
- The request sits in the email body.
- The weights and dimensions sit in an attachment, such as a packing list.
- The buy rates sit in rate sheets and on rate platforms.
- The margin for each customer sits in someone’s head or in a spreadsheet.
- Some rates are not online at all, so the rep has to email agents and truckers.
So a rep reads, copies, looks up, calculates and types, for every single request.
What does freight quote automation actually do?
nemox takes over the repetitive steps and leaves the decision with your team:
- It reads the request. nemox reads each request and its attachments in the background. The quote is ready when you open the email.
- It finds the lanes and rates. The platform matches each lane to your rate sheets and live rate platforms.
- It applies your margin. Profit categories are set per customer. nemox applies them as soon as it recognises the sender. Special charges, Incoterms and quote currency can be set per customer too.
- It drafts the reply. The offers, often with several alternatives, go straight into the email.
- It builds the PDF. One click turns the draft into a branded PDF quote with flight schedules.
- Your rep checks and sends.
What if a rate is not online? Agents and truckers are set up once, grouped by station or specialty. One click sends each of them an individual request from your own mailbox. nemox reads their replies and places each rate into the right leg of the quote.
Does anything go out without a human check?
No. nemox drafts, and your team reviews and sends. Nothing goes to a customer or into your TMS without a click. Every step is logged with the person who confirmed it.
Fully automatic replies are optional. You can switch them on only for the shipment types and weight bands you choose.
In practice, reps change little. More than half of all quotes go out exactly as drafted. When a rep does step in, it is usually a quick fix of 1 or 2 values, most often a trucking price or the shipment volume.
What results can forwarders expect?
Cargo Movers rolled out nemox in Sales first. These are its results, from the Cargo Movers case study:
| Metric | Before | With nemox |
|---|---|---|
| People needed for the daily quote requests | 4 | 1.5 |
| Quotes per sales rep per working day | 32 | 57 (+79%) |
| Quotes sent without a single edit | – | 52% |
| Layoffs | – | 0 |
Nobody lost their job. Cargo Movers did not backfill 2 roles, and 1 former quoter moved into Operations.
You can spend this capacity in 2 ways. You can run the same business with fewer people. Or you can win more business with the same team. Cargo Movers chose the first.
How does it fit into your inbox and TMS?
nemox works inside Outlook and Gmail, on desktop and on the web. Your team has nothing new to learn.
The platform connects to your TMS. It reads shipments and master data and writes accepted quotes back. Your team and nemox agree on the fields before go-live.
Don’t want to give mailbox access? You can forward requests to a dedicated nemox address instead. All data is hosted in the EU and never used to train AI models.
How do you get started?
The technical setup takes 2 to 3 days. nemox needs:
- your rate sheets
- access to the rate platforms you use
- your quote templates
- a TMS user
Your IT team gets a setup guide with screenshots. Rate sheets you send by email are live within hours. Most teams start with quoting and add more later.
See how quoting works step by step on the product page, or read the full Cargo Movers case study.
