Job Purpose
The Ocean Freight Tender Manager leads the end-to-end management of strategic global ocean freight RFQs, with a primary focus on high-value, high-complexity, multi-country/tradelane opportunities.
The role is responsible for translating customer requirements into a competitive, executable and commercially sound tender response by coordinating across Commercial, Ocean Freight Trade/LCL, Region/Country Growth teams, and relevant product stakeholders. The role ensures that tender submissions are aligned to agreed win strategy, meet internal governance requirements, and reflect operational feasibility, pricing discipline and high data quality.
The Ocean Freight Tender Manager acts as the central point of orchestration for global RFQs, driving timely decision making, stakeholder alignment and response excellence from tender receipt through submission, clarification, award and handover. At its core, the position acts as the vital connector—bringing Ocean Freight product experts closer to customers to deliver tailored solutions that secure RFQ success, fuel profitable growth, and strengthen our market leadership.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Tender Leadership
- Align and facilitate RFQ participation Go/No-Go decision with Commercial and OFR product management.
- Lead the end-to-end tender process for strategic global ocean freight RFQs from qualification through submission, customer clarification, award support and handover.
- Support development of a clear win strategy by consolidating customer requirements, market insight, network strengths and competitive positioning.
- Ensure the final submission presents a differentiated, customer-relevant, and operationally executable solution for all assigned tenders.
Cross-Functional Stakeholder Coordination
- Act as the central coordination point across Commercial, OFR Trade, Country Growth teams, countries, Pricing Specialists and relevant functional stakeholders for assigned RFQs.
- Align stakeholders on scope, timelines, responsibilities, assumptions and response strategy.
- Coordinate inputs across origin and destination countries, trade teams, product experts and pricing contributors to ensure one aligned DHL response.
- Drive timely engagement, clear accountability and decision making across all stakeholders throughout the RFQ lifecycle.
- Facilitate alignment between customer expectations, trade lane strategy, local market realities and operational capability.
- Escalate key issues, gaps, and risks in a timely manner to support decision making and maintain tender momentum.
Pricing, Solution Design and Decision Support
- Translate customer requirements into clear pricing instructions for Pricing Specialists to enable accurate completion of internal pricing templates and rate population.
- Work with trade and country stakeholders to validate service scope, routing options, carrier strategy, lead times, capacity considerations, and implementation readiness.
- Act as the voice of the customer to Trade: align & agree carrier selection, capacity allocation, and contract terms based on forecasted growth and lane priorities to meet customer requirements
- Consolidate pricing and solution inputs to support decisions on competitiveness, margin implications, strategic fit, operational feasibility and investment needs.
- Ensure all required approvals are secured prior to submission.
- Maintain visibility of assumptions, exceptions, dependencies, and decision logs throughout the tender cycle.
- Support inclusion of value-added services, digital solutions and sustainability elements where relevant to strengthen customer value proposition.
- Ensure the final offer is both commercially competitive and operationally executable.
Bid Quality, Data Integrity and Submission Management along Award Lifecycle
- Own the overall quality of tender content, pricing files and supporting documentation prior to submission.
- Ensure full compliance with customer instructions, templates, timelines and submission requirements.
- Perform rigorous quality assurance on pricing, assumptions, data consistency, formatting and completeness.
- Ensure complex rate structures, bunker mechanisms, indexation logic and surcharge applications are accurately reflected and communicated to pricing specialists where applicable.
- Deliver complete, timely and high-quality submissions that meet both customer expectations and internal standards.
- Ensure rate card integrity and autorating accuracy through the systematic tracking of update needs, and subsequent implementation, update and extension of applicable surcharges and/or index-linked rates in accordance with customer agreements to ensure valid rate cards exist in the transport management system.
- Ensure FMC compliance through adherence to rate card and NRA statement submission and filing processes prior to rate card loading and validity start date.
Customer Engagement, Commercial Performance and Continuous Improvement Support
- Support commercial teams in customer-facing tender discussions, clarification rounds and follow-up questions as the Ocean Freight tender subject matter expert.
- Provide subject matter input on market dynamics, trade lanes, solution design and offer structure where needed.
- Support award analysis, including win/loss review, pricing feedback and improvement actions.
- Ensure effective handover of awarded business to implementation, operations and country stakeholders.
- Capture lessons learned and best practices from major RFQs to strengthen future tender capability.
- Contribute to continuous improvement of tender governance, tools, templates and ways of working across the global Ocean Freight organization.
- Track Shipment to Profile performance and escalate deviations in time to Commercial Owners, monitor GP and steer yield management activities with regions/countries.
Qualifications & Experience
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent
- Minimum 6 years in Ocean Freight forwarding industry.
- At least 4 years in tender management or pricing leadership roles.
- Deep understanding of RFQ processes and Ocean Freight end-to-end operations.
- Advanced analytical and conceptual skills; strong Excel proficiency.
- Ability to negotiate and influence internally and externally.
- Strong stakeholder management and customer engagement capabilities.
- Ability to work effectively across cultures and regions.
- International travel (approx. 20%).
