Lesson 11 of 20
Freight Landed Cost — Normalizing Quotes That Cover Different Spans of the Same Trip
Supplier Screening & Evaluation · Logistics / Freight
Synthetic case data — evidence from real ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot runs.
Practice file: Download
case-file.txt— three freight quotes for the same two containers, in three currencies, ready to paste into any AI tool (Copilot free, ChatGPT, or Claude). You'll need it for the exercises below.
$7,470. €7,340. £4,725. Three freight forwarders quoting the same two containers, Shanghai to Hamburg. The cheapest-looking number is the most expensive. TranStar's £4,725 becomes €7,940 once you add the five cost categories its EXW terms left off the page — bunker surcharge, terminal handling at both ports, insurance, and customs. PacificBridge's $7,470, the largest raw number, is the cheapest true landed cost at €6,993.
The gap is not a footnote. CIF, FOB, and EXW each cover a different span of the same trip. TranStar's quote prices barely a third of the journey from the supplier's warehouse to cleared cargo at Hamburg. The rest arrives on invoices the quote never mentions.
Your logistics director wants one recommendation before the 3pm planning call: which forwarder wins the twelve-month lane award? This lesson teaches you to normalize all three scopes to one comparable figure, verify the AI's arithmetic by hand, and turn the result into a recommendation the director acts on in two minutes.
You’ve read the free three. The other seventeen are where the misses live.
The first lessons show what a general-purpose AI catches on a procurement task. The rest show what it misses — the unit conversion that survives an expert prompt, the two clauses it lists but never connects, the table that contradicts its own arithmetic. That gap is the job.
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