Senior Freight Forwarder

The Senior Freight Forwarder will actively manage the service delivery for the business with regard to all freight operations seeking to maintain good relations with clients and develop them further where appropriate.

Ensure consistent and regular contact is maintained with existing and potential clients, following up all quotations and enquiries received and processed by the freight team, ensuring these are swift, accurate and competitive.

Motivate and encourage the freight team to maintain high levels of service.

General Duties & Responsibilities

Sales and Freight Forwarding

• Monitor and increase quotation conversion rates whilst maintaining suitable profit margins.
• Maintain regular contact with our customer base to ensure freight opportunities are not missed and outstanding quotes are fully closed out.
• Develop and maintain a strong working relationship through regular contact with both internal and external customer accounts, ensuring any issues are identified and closed out quickly to the customer’s satisfaction.
• Prepare monthly reports for senior management at the end of each month; outlining current freight activity, any business or personnel issues, current prospects and general enquiry levels.
• Keep up to date with new legislation, news worthy items and reports that will help to provide informative communication to our external customers and the Group businesses.
• Undertake day to day freight duties as and when required.

Supervisory Duties and Responsibilities

• Manage and coordinate the weekly activities of the freight team, ensuring strong customer service is maintained.
• Hold regular meetings with the freight team to ensure issues are addressed and solutions quickly found. Ensure information is regularly shared between the team to ensure support from others is always available if needed.
• Encourage the team to find new opportunities for improvement, regularly review in-house procedures and administration functions to ensure the flow of information between our customer’s and business partners is prompt and accurate.
• Drive performance against monthly targets and goals through good leadership and supervision, monitoring progress and communicating back to the team on a regular basis.
• Regularly review the performance of our trading partners to ensure their rates and reliability is acceptable. Set up KPI reports to highlight poor performance.
• Resolving day-to-day issues with clients and vendors.
• Manage department holiday requests, training requirements and team requirements.
• Delegate freight work within the team and make sure any training requirements are met.
• Carry out any other appropriate duties to support the business that may be required.

Health, Safety & Environment

• Ensure that both you and colleagues work in a safe manner, respect the environment, maintain good housekeeping and hygiene throughout and proactively strive for best in class performance within the manufacturing sector.
• Ensure customers, contractors, visitors and other applicable third parties when on site comply with health, safety and environmental policies and procedures.
• Ensure you observe local health, safety and environmental requirements when travelling or visiting other premises.
• Promote a safe working environment by directly challenging or reporting unsafe or environmentally damaging practices and hazardous working conditions.
• Be observant at all times and where applicable make suggestions on health, safety and environmental improvements that can or should be made.
• Support environmental sustainability initiatives within the company such as segregating waste and switching off electrical equipment where appropriate and not in use
• To carry out any other duties not listed above as may reasonably be expected.

Person Specification

Knowledge, Experience & Skills

• Significant experience of working within a freight forwarding environment
• Knowledge of freight documentation is essential – (NES, HAWB, MAWB, EUR1,ATR, C of O, CMR)
• Experience of working in a manufacturing company is advantageous but not essential.
• Experience of leading / managing teams
• Experience within a sales environment

Competencies

• Ability to work under pressure within time constraints demonstrating a confident, thorough and motivated approach.
• Strong organisational skills with ability to work to targets and deadlines
• Excellent IT skills
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• Ability to work independently and part of a team
• Delivers high quality of service

Qualifications           

• Educated to GCSE level or equivalent
• Minimum 3 years experience in a similar role
• Advantageous – Introduction To Air Cargo-Procedures & operations Oct 2014
• Advantageous – Introduction to Cargo- Basic Rating Oct 2014
• Advantageous – SRF BTEC Level 2 Intermediate Award in Multi-Model International Freight Procedures Oct 2014