Convoy, the Seattle based digital freight network, announced the launch of Carrier Insights, a new feature in Convoy Connect, the company’s free transportation management system (TMS) that helps shippers centralize their routing guide and cut tendering time.
Supply chain professionals have traditionally relied on incomplete information to determine how they allocate freight to their carriers. Data points such as tender acceptance and response rates are often provided by individual carriers in different formats, at different intervals, and with varying levels of precision.
Fragmented legacy systems make it difficult for shippers to consistently and accurately measure and compare the performance of their carriers, said Michael Lu, Convoy’s director of product, in a press release. .
“Many of the shippers we speak with use email and spreadsheets to manage their freight,” Lu said. As a result, they lack data to determine whether they’re working with “the most reliable carriers with the highest service levels.”
Convoy’s Carrier Insights aims to improve transparency by aggregating carrier performance metrics, helping transportation managers compare performance and freight spend across their entire routing guide.
More specifically, the aggregated carrier list view enables shippers to quickly identify who services the majority of their freight by viewing active lanes and freight spend by carrier.
Simultaneously, individual carrier scorecards enable shippers to compare response and acceptance rates by carrier and understand whether their top carriers are meeting service level agreements.
And with real-time updates, shippers can continuously audit carrier performance to understand trends over time. Transportation managers can then award freight to carriers based on real-time visibility into shipment volume, spend, response rate, acceptance rate and average response time.
With Carrier Insights, shippers now have the data they need to make informed decisions about which carriers to trust with their freight,” Lu said.
Dave
Linda, just try the free carrier qualification and verification system built into AscendTMS. They take hundreds of carrier metrics and make sense of them for shippers and brokers when you are potentially onboarding a brand new carrier or about to put one of your existing carriers on a load.
You need to know that the carrier is qualified, safe, and that there are no fraud alerts in them before they pick up your loads. AscendTMS will tell you all that and it’s free to you. You can also use systems like carrier 411 or safer watch which are good and do the same thing, but you have to pay for them. Ascend is free.
The Ascend system will also tell you the lanes a carrier typically runs and where they have had inspections and crashes etc. So if someone only usually runs the NE area and they are suddenly trying to pickup your load in Arizona then alarm bells should go off and they are either a chameleon carrier, fraudulent broker, or worse (that little feature saved us $160,000 once) lol
Good look and be safe out there.