Let’s be clear about something: freight brokerage is a service business. Not a product. Not technology. But a service. And as a B2B service, what customers are looking for first and foremost is a tripod of (1) service quality (what in other industries is governed by a written SLA - Service Level Agreement), (2) customer experience and (3) price. This won’t change anytime soon, and it probably shouldn’t.

These 3 items are table stakes: deliver on your promises (pickup/deliver on time), provide easy, frequent communication and offer a competitive price.

Loadsmart invests a lot of time and effort to deliver on these three areas -- and will keep doing so to meet our customer expectations.

But we believe we can do more. Not only providing these 3 main and important priorities, but more. We believe our technology is the incremental value-add proposition that sets us apart.

Loadsmart was the first to introduce instant FTL pricing and booking to the US market, and then expanded that into API pricing directly into our shipper’s TMS. Why does that matter? Because for spot shipments, shippers receive an automatic price for every single load they need to move, without the manual processes. We believe in a few years, spot transactions - at least on the enterprise side - will be done 100% via APIs, with zero email/calls for quote discovery and tender bookings.

On this journey we discovered that, although we were providing prices automatically and instantaneously for every load, transportation planners were checking those prices manually to know if they were good or bad rates.

Turns out, we were creating more work, not less (especially because we were sending thousands of rates!). In response, our engineers built a “price checking” formula into the algorithms - so transportation planners will only receive our rate if it matches the shipper’s internal fairness test (i.e. rates are within 10% of a market index, within a percentage of an already previously tendered load).

To mitigate the constant tug of war between shippers and brokers when market volatility kicks in, we invented ‘Reliable Contracts’, which shows our shippers the true cost of a truck. We agree upon a ceiling rate and target rate with our shippers and the higher Loadsmart buys, the less margin we make. The program guarantees capacity and cost savings without costly re-bids. Full rate transparency, 100% tender acceptance and margin incentives in our shippers favor make this program a big improvement on the traditional contract model.

To support our shippers with their RFP processes, we launched ShipperGuide, a procurement platform that empowers shippers of all sizes to plan, procure and execute freight in one place. That means a single portal to manage upcoming shipment requirements, get spot and contract rates from their own carrier base, identify high-performing carriers, and tender and track loads from pickup to delivery.

Additionally, Loadsmart’s leading dock scheduling solution, Opendock, allows warehouses to schedule dock appointments and manage them in real-time, improving efficiency and reducing dwell time. Today, it serves over 3,000 warehouses with 600,000+ appointments scheduled every month.
For shippers with an annual freight spend anywhere between $3M to $100M that don’t want to set up their own internal logistics department, we provide a bundled package of these transportation services and technology together: our Managed Transportation solutions that don't require any third party additional cost structure.

This mix of service obsession plus technology solutions attracted the largest logistics players in the world to invest and partner with us - Maersk, TFI International, Ports America and CSX - allowing for continued collaboration and idea sharing with the foremost leaders in transportation.

Yes, we are in the service business and we are obsessed about it. As freight brokerage evolves, cutting-edge technologies can create true value-add solutions that help shippers, warehouses and carriers move more with less.