RFP processes weren’t built for today’s market
Transportation teams are struggling to keep up in a volatile freight market that requires quick-turn contract sourcing outside of the annual RFP cycle. When you need to react quickly, manual and disconnected setups are major bottlenecks. Lane lists, carrier lists, and bid templates get rebuilt from scratch every time, right when speed matters most.
Email and spreadsheets simply can’t scale to meet this demand. When you run sourcing events through fragmented channels, there is no visibility into response status, version control breaks down, and copy/paste errors creep in.
Market insight is also disconnected from the workflow. Rate benchmarks live in a separate tool, so validating a bid means piecing the analysis together by hand. Without an audit trail, reconstructing the story behind an award made months ago takes time you don’t have, making decisions incredibly hard to defend later.
Transportation procurement doesn’t have to be a big event
DAT Contract Bid is purpose-built for the sourcing that happens between annual RFPs. It consolidates contract procurement into one workflow, with market rate benchmarks built in so every award is confident and defensible.
With DAT Contract Bid, you can react quickly to market volatility without getting bogged down by administrative overhead:
- Stop rebuilding from scratch: Upload lanes, carriers, and bid details once and reuse them for every event.
- Full visibility, every round: Track participation, compare bids across rounds, and identify coverage gaps.
- Award with confidence: Evaluate against verified DAT market rates and lowest-cost comparisons, so every decision is defensible before you make it.
- Document every decision: Gain TMS-ready outputs for clean handoffs, plus a complete audit trail to defend every decision to finance and leadership.
How it works
DAT Contract Bid simplifies the entire sourcing lifecycle into three seamless steps:
- Build your RFP & request bids: Upload lanes and networks, set deadlines, send invitations, and track progress all in one place.
- Analyze bids with market data: Contextualize bid submissions against embedded Rateview insights and lowest-cost scenario comparisons.
- Make & send awards: Finalize the round, allocate volume, send notifications, and update routing guides.
Get started today
Stop managing version-control chaos and start making data-backed evaluations. Talk to our team about running your first sourcing event on DAT Contract Bid.
