Explorate, an Australian digital forwarder, used to reformat every carrier rate file by hand before it could quote from it, and some of those files ran past 200 lines. In 2020 SeaRates advised logistics companies to automate repetitive work. Adelante SCM and Descartes have since surveyed forwarders, and their 2025 reports put numbers on how far logistics company automation has got.
What did Explorate do with a rate sheet every two weeks?
Explorate received carrier rates in a variety of formats (PDFs, spreadsheets, emails) and fitted each one to its own rate management system line by line. Per Wove, shipping lines then shifted to releasing updated rates every two weeks, and an occasional chore turned into a standing one. Explorate’s co-founder told Wove’s case study that the team was constantly at risk of quoting outdated rates or answering customers late. The forwarder brought in Wove’s ingestion engine, which loads a tariff straight into the system. The case study says what once took manual formatting and hours of effort can now be done in minutes, and Explorate’s commercial manager calls the speed of ingesting shipping line rates “extremely efficient”.
The study gives no percentage, says the saving is hard to precisely quantify, and is Wove’s own.
Explorate’s burden came from a task that repeated every two weeks, arrived in several formats and fed its quotes. In your own office, list every document and rate file the team retypes and count how often each one arrives. The one that repeats most goes first on the list.
What shippers ask for and what forwarders run on
In Adelante SCM’s The State of Digitization in Freight Forwarding 2025, 67% of 24 shipper executives from the Indago research community named real-time shipment tracking as the capability they value most from a forwarder. Integration with their own systems came second (57%). In the separate survey of 71 forwarders and logistics providers, only 23% use a real-time visibility solution and fewer than 40% use a freight forwarding management system. Adelante says the results suggest many forwarders rely on spreadsheets or other low-tech or no-tech tools for shipment management, rate management, quoting and booking.
A separate measure gives the same number: only 23% of those forwarders had digitized more than 75% of their business processes. Shippers, for their part, can already track a container by bill of lading number without a forwarder’s update.
What holds forwarders back
Adelante also asked about the biggest obstacle to digitizing, and 51% of Adelante’s respondents named cost: technology is too expensive. Integration with legacy systems followed at 40%, lack of IT resources at 37% and resistance to change at 35%.
Descartes’ 2025 Forwarder/Broker Benchmark surveyed 434 customs brokers and freight forwarders and asked about growth inhibitors. Manual processes, the target of any logistics company automation project, came first at 25% and have been a prevailing inhibitor since 2019. Lack of skilled logistics and customs staff, the leading brake in 2019 at 33%, fell to 17%.
Frequently asked questions
Do small forwarders adopt technology as fast as large ones?
Fewer do, by Descartes' measure. In its 2025 benchmark, about one-third (32%) of large companies (over 100K shipments a year) call themselves early adopters, against 17% of small ones (under 10K shipments). Small companies name access to capital (27%) as their top growth inhibitor.
Which forwarder operations are first in line for AI?
In the Adelante SCM survey (61 forwarders and logistics providers answered this question), freight pricing and quoting came first at 39% of respondents, ahead of documentation automation at 33%, warehousing and inventory at 31% and freight invoicing at 30%. The question covered solutions already implemented or planned.
Which software do forwarders already run before a freight forwarding system?
In Adelante SCM's 2025 survey, the freight forwarding management system ranked fourth among the systems forwarders use, behind a warehouse management system (52%), a transportation management system (46%) and customer relationship management software (42%).