Kuehne + Nagel has signed a contract to use Inforwarding's AFRA airfreight rates database across its worldwide network of 98 countries.

AFRA will enable Kuehne + Nagel to seamlessly capture contract, promotional and general airfreight rates from airlines and GSAs, speeding up its existing market information and buying processes and enabling the company to buy airline capacity in the most efficient way. AFRA provides advanced features to create and distribute sales and internal nett rates to customers and other network offices. It also allows for rates to be easily uploaded from various sources and in a variety of formats.

Kuehne + Nagel will launch the AFRA service throughout its international network immediately following a successful trial in Germany. Additional head office functionality has been added to AFRA for Kuehne + Nagel to facilitate gateway management across markets.

"With AFRA as the single platform of rate-management, we will provide our organization with a tool that offers a comprehensive overview of available rates from various airlines. In addition we will be able to integrate these rates into CIEL, our globally standardised forwarding application, thus reducing manual rate maintenance and improving the overall efficiency of our rate management process", Frank Vetter, Director Processes and Systems Kuehne + Nagel, stated.

Dirk de Rooij, Director of Inforwarding, said: "Rates are distributed by airlines in a variety of formats, including mail, email with attachments and fax. This makes it difficult for agents to search and find the right rate at the right time. It is also time-consuming for the agent to get a market overview for a specific tradelane or destination and take advantage of promotional rates. AFRA removes these obstacles and provides a wealth of other benefits, such as helping forwarders to prepare RFQ responses or distribute rates to overseas offices.

"We are delighted that Kuehne + Nagel, one of the world's leading logistics companies, is the launch customer for the new AFRA Enterprise solution. The company has identified the productivity and profit-building potential of the service and we expect other companies to follow Kuehne + Nagel's lead. The worldwide infrastructure of OAG provides the added stability and resources required to support the effective deployment of AFRA within the Kuehne + Nagel network."