Haven’s planned path toward TMS

The global logistics startup Haven was previously known as an ocean freight marketplace, but used that platform as data discovery to build a collaborative workflow system.    Matt Tillman has a vision of how global shipping will mostly be conducted in the near future, and it doesn’t involve email.
   The company that Tillman co-founded, Haven, on Wednesday released a new transportation management and collaboration platform designed, above all, to reimagine how shippers conduct their global shipments.
   “It’s no longer about ‘managing’ transport, it’s about automating transportation,” Tillman told American Shipper. “TMS 2.0 built for the customer (shipper) and not the forwarders to automate common workflows using data. Transportation automation software will be the next wave of tech in my opinion.”
   The release of Haven TMS, what the company describes as an “end-to-end logistics management platform,” might seem like a bit of a departure for those familiar with Haven.
   The company was probably known more as a private freight rate marketplace – that is, an online platform where shippers could book and later track shipments using their own book of carriers and forwarders.
   The previous iteration of Haven was centered around using the efficiencies of automation. The company landed a number of major commodity traders as customers.
   But Haven was actually eyeing a different goal long-term, Tillman said in a briefing of the new TMS with American Shipper. The marketplace was essentially a place to better understand shipper freight management behavior and incorporate that learning into a more efficient collaborative execution platform.
   “We realized that TMSs were good at storing information, but they were not good at using that data to automate processes,” said Tillman, whose previous experience includes founded companies in advertising and financial technology. “All this tech was point solutions that didn’t manage their business the way they wanted. Or it was old and clunky.”
   He emphasized that global transportation management tools are often built for what he considers the supply side of the equation (meaning ocean carriers), or specifically for freight forwarders and global 3PLs.
   Haven TMS combines tools for freight booking, rate management, documentation generation, and visibility, but the real key is that collaboration between a shipper and its service providers isn’t reliant on email. All communication is designed to occur within the platform, so that multiple offices within a shipper’s internal network can collectively work on the same process, such as booking, for example.
   Customers on-board their own vendors, and rates from those carriers are not shared in any way. Tillman made a point of noting that Haven doesn’t share or sell data from its customers or partners.
   “It works with any carrier you bring to the platform,” he said. “There’s a fully active and realized spot market on behalf of the customer. All this pricing is customer-specific, and we don’t share rates across customers.”
   The Haven platform has been especially embraced by commodity trading houses, for whom an incremental savings in logistics administrative costs can significantly affect profit margins. The ability to navigate those processes more efficiently doesn’t eliminate the need for them to negotiate with logistics vendors, Tillman said. It just allows them to do more trading (and negotiate more often) because the processes don’t take as long.
   “Rates don’t matter to us,” he said. “But our customers love negotiating rates. This just grows the amount of product shipped and number of trades because it takes less time to negotiate.”
   Haven’s platform allows shippers to coordinate with banks, customs brokers, and suppliers, while only allowing parties access to the data the shippers wants them to see. The TMS also includes a blockchain-like mechanism for storing critical shipment documentation that’s useful from an audit trail and collaborative perspective.
   In a statement, Haven said it facilitates the shipment of $3.5 billion in cargo value each year and services the majority of the world’s largest commodity trading firms through Haven TMS. Tillman said in the statement that the goal of the platform is to essentially serve as the “Salesforce for logistics, capturing the end-to-end workflow of shipping cargo.”
   American Shipper profiled Haven in its October cover story, and Tillman recently wrote about blockchain in American Shipper’s sister publication, the Adam Smith Project.