The LinkedIn of freight forwards, Highly Interconnected & Vibrant E-trade aka HIVE.

After a long silence, I finally found time to write about what I’m working on for last few years (2 years). It took me few months of hard working to understand how big what I have signup for. As one of the core developer of Hive team I’m starting to understand how useful Hive is for the global fright forwards community. Not only freight forwards, but this can also be useful for every human being who wants to ship or receive something via courier service.

Without further due let’s get into the business. ASEAN trade is a Trillion dollar business and its growing faster than ever. It's like the world can’t live without trade in this part of the world. That being said, Singapore is becoming the centre of ASEAN trade and mainly because of its strategically important port and its healthy history of being a strong transport hub. There are giants when it comes to freight forwarding but as far as I understand there are small players who are challenging these large-scale freight forwards. what is lacking with this small-scale freight forwards is technology. However, until recently there was no proper digital footprint for these freight forwarding communities and therefore they operated as independent communities. That’s where HIVE came into action. To bridge the gap between these freight forwarders and mobilize them with cutting edge technology.

Let me take high-level use case to explain some of the features we offer in Hive.

·         Company A – is the shipper

There is Company A who has a payload that needs to send to Dubai on a budget and a deadline. Normally what will happen is Company A will contact his few known suppliers who can handle this and just depend on them. But using Hive Company A can get to know new companies who can handle this.

Once Company A got registered with Hive they can easily find new partners and connect with them like any other social media platform you know. let's see how you do this using Hive,

Partner discovery.

Partner Discover Search aka PDS is one of the well-known features of Hive and one of the most useful. You can easily search companies different filters such as,

• Country
• Company Name
• Activities & Services
• Industries

Using this feature you can easily find, browse and even get connected with them using a single click within the application. 

Easy networking with trading companies

One of the main benefits of Hive is the comprehensive supplier database which represents companies across the globe. From Singapore to Panama we have over 4600+ companies registered with Hive to provide their services.

Let's assume Company A needs to clarify some legal stuff, then the company can easily post a public post in Hive wall and let all the interested companies help them to clarify the matter. You can even post public announcements or company events in Hive wall to let the community know what's happening. 

Hive wall

This simple feature lets you share about company updates, announcements or even queries related to freight forwards community. The poster can upload a banner or an image about the post for clear understanding.  

Ok, Now back to the use case. Now Company A has a come up with all the numbers and other related factors which is very important for the transport and delivery of the payload. Now they actually have to find a supplier who is willing to take the responsibility of transport and logistics of the payload. As we all know this is a hectic process and might have to spend more time than expected when it comes to the negotiation process of the prices. Let's see how Company A can handle this scenario using Hive.

Request for quotation 

This is the newest member of the Hive feature list. This feature allows you to create your logistic requirement and get companies to send quotations for the requirement. This feature is expected to revolutionize the freight forwarding ecosystem. By connecting shipper and supplier furthermore in a very interactive way. Simple but efficient features of RFQ will help you to find the best match by making a small competition between supplier companies.  This will increase the company efficiency and profit margin in a large-scale. 

So that's a quick introduction about Hive and few of its core features. I'm hoping to do dedicated blogs about each one of features in the future so please stay tuned.