freightweb

Automated Freight Sourcing & Matching.

Problem Analysis

There is a lot of manual work that goes into moving freight within the logistics industry. This leads to many wasted hours and reduced margins within a freight brokerage.

On average, it takes a freight broker 2-3 hours to source a carrier and have an agreement in place to transport goods from origin to desintation. Even then, the agreement only provides necessary documents. Updates and changes still need to be managed with additional emails or phone calls. Once the agreement is in place, there is little information available to brokerages about the driver moving it, whether or not they are running on time, and the shipments exact location.

Lastly, many of the managment systems on the market offer very poor user experiences with cumbersome and difficult to learn interfaces leading to additional wasted time and resources.

Solution

With the goal of transforming the industry with machine learning and a proprietary matching algorithm, we set out to match brokers looking to move domestic goods with carriers who have the available capacity and are looking for freight to fill their trucks. In order to achieve this, we would need a solution that opened up the line of communication for everyone involved.

The Shipping Hub is the first piece to solving the problem. With Shipping Hub, brokers create loads with reverse-eBay style auctions. The auctions are immediately available to all carriers through a public load board. The load is also passed through the matching algorithm and matches can be invited to place a bid. Once an auction closes, the load is converted to a shipment which receives up to the minute updates on status and driver location.

The Carrier Hub is a fully-featured TMS (truck management system). It allows a carrier's dispatcher to find loads on partner load boards and FreightWeb's own auctions. It also allows carriers to input and track and download their shipments, payments, drivers, financial data and much more.

The Driver Hub allows the drivers to provide updates to their dispatcher on their current load, view upcoming loads, open turn-by-turn directions, upload and view shipment documents and even view past paystubs.

Result

The app ecosystem consists of 4 apps including the previously unmentioned Admin Hub. All 4 share styles and components. The styles are applied through a package imported into each app allowing all apps to share the same stylesheets. Components required by more than one of the apps are maintained in a component library allowing them to be shared across apps as well.

By foucusing on displaying only relevant and momentary infomation, the end-to-end user experience is made up of clutter-free workflows that vastly improve task completion times. The UI is visually unified and more easily manageable over competitors products. There was an also an additional focus on simplicity and ease of use to lessen the learning curve that other logistics software requires. To add to this the user experience is streamlined, appealing and fully transparent for all invested parties.

In regard to the initial goal of reducing manual effort for brokers, we were able to estimate that on average, brokers were spending ~30 minutes on placing each load. This was a vast improvement over traditional call/email efforts.