Industries · Logistics and transport

One tender draws on facts owned by five different functions.

Capacity from Operations. Rates and accessorials from Pricing. Customs attestations from Compliance, per country. Liability from Legal. Integration from Solutions. Nobody owns the whole answer, and the shipper set the date.

Built for bid and tender teams, key accounts, pricing, and trade compliance.

Add the next lane group and it reuses the same rates and attestations.

01

Shipper RFPs and freight tenders

First workflow live

Lane-by-lane pricing and capacity answered before the bid window closes.

02

Customs and security evidence

Same answers, second document

AEO, C-TPAT and trade attestations, from the filings already made.

03

Sustainability disclosure

Once the foundation holds

Emissions and ESG answers on the same network data the tender used.

  • Operations
  • Pricing and yield
  • Trade compliance
  • Sales

Tribble Brain

  • KnowledgeEvery approved answer, with the document it came from
  • GovernanceAn owner, a version and a review state on each one
  • AutomationThe same answer, wherever in the business it is asked for
  • Lane and capacityOrigin-destination coverage, equipment types, transit times, committed volume
  • Rate tablesLinehaul, fuel, accessorials, peak surcharges, index clauses
  • Customs and tradeAEO and C-TPAT status, denied-party screening, HS classification
  • Liability and insuranceCargo limits, certificates of insurance, claims ratios
  • Network and sitesDC footprint, WMS capability, dock and yard capacity
  • Prior tendersLast bid pricing, what won, and what the shipper said about why

Fed fromTMS and WMS · CRM · rate engine · SharePoint · Slack and Teams · customs filings · prior tender library

A tender asks about every lane at once. Five owners answering separately is how the bid goes in late.

Where the tender actually goes wrong.

Not for want of capability — the network can do the work. Every fact in the submission already exists, in five places, owned by five people, on five revision cycles.

  • 01

    The tender desk

    Shipper RFPs and freight tenders are among the largest structured documents in B2B — lane-level rate tables, service-level commitments, security annexes and sustainability disclosures, renewing on rolling two- and three-year cycles.

    Assembling them is manual, and the same questions recur across shippers, verticals and geographies in different formats, so the work is repeated rather than reused.

    The tender machine never stops. The answers never carry forward.

  • 02

    Cross-sell across lines of business

    A seller who covers freight forwarding can’t describe contract logistics capability with confidence, so they never open that conversation. The same is true in every direction across the group.

    The incentive to cross-sell is usually already in place. The language to do it isn’t.

    Four other lines of business the account will never hear about.

  • 03

    Customs, trade and compliance

    HS classification, duty treatment, restricted-party screening and shifting regimes across every country served — answered today by finding the right specialist and waiting.

    C-TPAT, AEO and TAPA evidence requests arrive in a new wrapper from every shipper, and the evidence that satisfies one is usually the evidence that satisfies the next.

    Senior specialist time goes to answers that already exist.

What Tribble does about it.

One approved answer per lane, service and certification, with its owner attached. The next tender reuses it.

  1. 1

    Load it

    Rate history, service descriptions and customs attestations arrive with permissions and versions intact.

  2. 2

    Answer from it

    Ready before the tender drops. Each answer shows the rate sheet or attestation behind it, and its expiry.

  3. 3

    Keep what you learn

    A pricing correction becomes next time’s answer. Owners review the 10–20% that is genuinely new.

The documents a logistics group actually files.

Each takes the same route. Follow one through.

What we would measure.

Agreed up front, and judged against how tendering runs today.

Tender cycle timeDays to a complete first-pass submission, against the hours the last one took
First-pass qualityShare of outputs citing a governed source at acceptable quality
Expert review burdenOperations, Pricing and Compliance time against a target of reviewing the 10–20% that’s genuinely new
Commitment consistencyWhether the submission matches the rate table and the network record
Coverage without headcountShippers, verticals and geographies answered per quarter
Cross-line conversationsBundling conversations started from approved language

Proof.

Americold runs its RFx workflow on Tribble. The figures below come from the same job elsewhere: hundreds of questions, five people who own the answers, one deadline the buyer set.

AmericoldFortune 500 cold chain, running its RFx workflow on Tribble
93% first passSalesforce, on a 973-question RFP
200 questions, under an hourClari, on a single RFPRead the story →

The first engagement: one workflow, eight weeks.

One lane group, one workflow. We baseline today’s tender turnaround first.

  1. 1

    Connect · week 0

    Scope and owners named. Sources ingested from prior tenders, rate and lane history, service descriptions, certifications and annexes. We measure how the work runs today first.

  2. 2

    Build · weeks 1–3

    Assembled from prior tenders and rate history. Pricing and Compliance approve it.

  3. 3

    Pilot · weeks 4–6

    Live on a real tender. We tune against what pricing and compliance change.

  4. 4

    Prove · weeks 7–8

    Measured against the baseline: time to a submitted tender, and how many owners it touched.

What people ask

A few are worth asking your own pricing and compliance owners first.

How long does a shipper tender take to answer today, and where does the time actually go?

Most teams have never measured it, which is the first thing worth fixing. The number worth bringing to a first conversation is how many expert hours a single tender consumes across sales, pricing, operations and compliance. It’s usually larger than anyone expects, because the time is distributed across five functions and nobody owns the total. We would rather build that model with your team than guess at it.

We’ve already chosen an AI platform. Where does this fit?

Build the agent wherever you like. The gap is what the agent answers from: prior tenders, rate histories, lane commitments, facility certifications and annexes, spread across lines of business and countries. A governed answer layer is the content those tools have to draw on, not a competing destination. If your selection criteria included human review before anything ships and embedding into tools people already use, those still hold here.

Can it keep a submission consistent with the rate table?

That’s a specific step in the loop. Responses are validated across the full submission and against the rate table and network record, so contradictions and commitment drift are caught before the shipper sees them rather than after you’re contractually bound to them.

What about customs and trade questions across many countries?

Restricted-party lists and certifications live beside the customer and contract files, so a screening hit is checked against current list data and every clearance traces to the list version and the rule that cleared it. Export-control and end-use questions return the classification and the policy behind it, not a guess.

What does the first engagement look like?

One line of business, one content estate, one team — typically transportation tender response, because it’s the largest document and the hardest deadline. Eight weeks from content connection to a first drafted tender, with the success threshold agreed before kickoff.

Send one redacted tender.

Won or live, it doesn’t matter. We’ll map where the last complete response actually lives today, and agree the success measure before kickoff so the pilot is judged on your terms.

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