Convoy Integrates Online Truckload Booking Platform with Modern TMS to Give Shippers More Control Over Their Freight

Transportation teams can cut tendering time in half, lower freight costs with automated competitive bidding, and award freight to any carrier or broker in their network from one integrated platform

Convoy, digital freight network launched a new online platform that brings together the company’s on-demand truckload capacity offering, Shipper Platform, with its modern transportation management system (TMS), Convoy Connect. While online capacity and TMS tools have traditionally been offered as separate solutions, Convoy’s combined approach provides shippers with comprehensive freight management capabilities while ensuring the privacy of sensitive data with a sandboxed routing guide. Shippers using the new platform have been able to cut their tendering time in half and reduce freight spend by automating and standardizing their bid processes.

Enabling Shippers to Take Control of their Freight

For many transportation teams, getting shipments covered is an inefficient, manual process that requires hours of back-and-forth phone calls and emails. In addition, most shippers have yet to adopt a TMS, instead relying on a mix of spreadsheets, email, and paper to manage their freight. Without centralized software, these shippers award freight without accurately benchmarking their carriers, resulting in higher costs and lower quality of service.

With today’s launch, shippers can more easily work with their existing carriers and brokers, and also access more than 300,000 trucks from Convoy’s nationwide network of vetted carriers, getting on-demand coverage in minutes rather than hours. Once a shipment is booked, transportation teams get visibility into the truck’s location and estimated time of arrival through online GPS tracking and automated notifications. With Convoy’s built-in TMS capabilities, shippers can adopt a centralized routing guide and streamlined workflows for sourcing quotes, tendering shipments, and evaluating performance across all of their brokers and carriers.

New features launching today within the integrated platform include:

• A spot auction manager that automates quote requests and helps shippers quickly select winning bids from any carrier or broker in their network.
• Automated facility notifications that share real-time shipment status milestones with key facility contacts.
• Automated BOLs that save shippers time and reduce communication errors.
• The ability to view and get real-time tracking on all Convoy freight, including loads tendered via EDI, email, or other methods in a central dashboard.

“Many shippers still manage their freight using email, spreadsheets, and paper,” said Ziad Ismail, Chief Product Officer at Convoy. “This manual approach reduces the efficiency of every shipping process, from getting coverage and tracking loads to benchmarking carriers and making data-driven procurement decisions. The future of freight is built around solutions that combine TMS, capacity booking, shipment visibility, and analytics. Today’s launch is the next natural step in this evolution, and the response has been overwhelming. Over the last few months, hundreds of customers have already adopted our new online platform.”

Customers Reduce Freight Spend with Centralized Routing Guide and Competitive Bidding

Today’s launch comes amid surging customer demand for Convoy’s digital freight network, driven by the need to get more reliable coverage while reducing transportation costs. General Insulation Company began using Convoy as a way to centralize its tendering process and source competitive bids from its preferred carriers. Over the course of four months, the company estimates that they avoided more than $150,000 in costs by benchmarking carrier rates on spot shipments.

“In a business where lead time is money, Convoy has been a game-changer,” said Ian Allison, Transportation and Supply Chain Manager at General Insulation Company. “Before Convoy, we didn’t have sufficient visibility into our branch offices or efficient processes for benchmarking carrier performance and spend. Now we’ve got a centralized dashboard that gives us better control over our tendering process, faster bid response time, and insights into the performance of all the carriers we work with.”

With distribution facilities across the US, Almo Corporation needed a better way to ensure they were paying competitive rates, and data that would help them understand relative carrier and broker performance on their spot loads. Using Convoy, they began putting spot shipments out for bid. Over the course of several months, the transportation team compared the competitive bid rates to the prices they’d been paying prior to using Convoy. In some instances, they found that they’d been paying a premium without the benefits of more competitive bidding.

“In the past, we had very manual processes around our truckload spot-quote business. We looked at some TMS products and found them to be overly complex or cost-prohibitive, especially in an environment where our IT resources were busy with simultaneous ERP and WMS implementations. It just wasn’t the right time,” said Keith Granstrom, Director of Transportation Support at Almo Corporation. “With Convoy, we found the perfect solution—a free, cloud-based TMS that was instantly accessible to all of our distribution facilities and easy to use. It’s given us faster access to more capacity while ensuring that our truckload transportation costs were market-competitive.”

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