Thanks to Shipsta by Freightos, we have significantly increased our cost competitiveness on the tendered freight volume. We are managing our freight procurement more efficiently and our country teams are enabled to operate more strategically
Alexander Scheld
Global Head of Logistics at Holcim
About Holcim
Holcim is a global leader in building materials and solutions, providing sustainable and innovative products to the construction industry. Founded in 1912 in Switzerland, Holcim operates in over 70 countries, with a focus on delivering high-quality products such as cement, aggregates, ready-mix concrete, and asphalt. The company serves a wide range of sectors, including residential, commercial, and infrastructure projects.
Holcim’s commitment to sustainability is central to its operations. The company strives to drive circular construction practices, reduce carbon emissions, and promote the use of recycled materials in its products. With an emphasis on digital transformation, Holcim continues to leverage cutting-edge technology to improve its processes and enhance customer experience.
By combining a strong heritage of industry leadership with a forward-looking approach to environmental stewardship and innovation, Holcim aims to shape the future of construction and create value for its customers, shareholders, and communities worldwide.

The Challenge: Enhance supply chain visibility to improve freight cost competitiveness
To address the challenges in managing its complex global supply chain, Holcim faced several key issues that hindered operational efficiency and cost transparency.
- Global supplier base: Holcim has a highly geographically distributed supplier base with thousands of trucking providers across its multiple markets.
- Lack of rate transparency: Managing freight rates from so many, localized suppliers made it difficult to get a comprehensive overview of freight cost and available market capacity.
- Country-based KPIs: The number of invited service providers varied considerably from country to country, lacking visibility of global KPIs on supplier awarding.
- Manual processes: Holcim’s teams were heavily reliant on manual processes to execute their tenders, leading to inefficient and decentralized sourcing workflows.
Given the low cost per ton of our products, monitoring logistics costs is extremely important in our industry”
Alexander Scheld
Global Head of Logistics at Holcim
The Solution: Data-driven digital freight tendering for enhanced supply chain visibility
Holcim aimed at a system that would bring together all of its suppliers while catering to the specific needs of each geographical market. Through a ‘scale up’ strategy, SHIPSTA by Freightos was extended across the company to an increasing number of country-based teams.
During the rollout, Holcim standardized internal processes for procuring rates across all units to ensure their teams were fully synchronized.
Shipsta by Freightos´ solution for Holcim:
- Immediate analysis of supplier quotes
- Freight procurement at country level was centralized on one platform
- The platform enabled customization such as multi-language support to meet specific market requirements
- The intuitive interface & customer-centric onboarding enabled easy change management across 30+ countries
- Full commitment to product innovation empowered Holcim to stay at the forefront of supply chain leadership
We wanted everything in one place to enable seamless integration between the supplier’s quote and our ability to evaluate it.
Alexander Scheld
Global Head of Logistics at Holcim
The outcome: Complete visibility, reduced freight costs, and optimized execution power
Holcim is using SHIPSTA for freight tendering across all their product lines, distributing their complex requests-for-quotation (RfQs) in just few minutes.
Their country teams benefit now from greater transparency and execution power, by easily managing within the platform the whole tendering process across hundreds of suppliers.
With a global visibility of their KPIs, Holcim has increased cost competitiveness and efficiency in their tendering process by also boosting the number of invited suppliers.
Collaborating with Shipsta by Freighros enabled Holcim to maximize their performance, scaling fast across 30+ countries and 12 languages and showcasing how even more traditional industries, like building solutions, can stay at the cutting edge of innovation through implementing future-ready freight procurement technology.
And this is just the beginning… Shipsta by Freightos has evolved from a platform to a trusted partner, closely accompanying Holcim on their mission of building progress for people and the planet.
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