Hot on the heels of our recent funding announcement (more on that here), we sat down with Betty Liu, Operating Partner @ Maersk Growth, to discuss the story behind the financing and…

• What Maersk hopes to achieve in starting a venture fund,
• The challenges facing the freight brokerage industry (… and how today’s technologies hold the potential to make it radically more efficient),
• What made Maersk move from meeting Loadsmart to leading our latest financing just four months later, and
• How Maersk can now leverage Loadsmart for FTL services.

About Betty:

Betty is an Opeating Partner at Maersk Growth and is helping our invested portfolio companies to grow. She has spent over two decades in the shipping and logistics industry, with much of her career spent at A.P. Moller – Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line.

Betty holds an Executive MBA from the Copenhagen Business School and graduated from Maersk’s International Shipping Education program in 2002. In 2012 she was nominated as Denmark’s Top 100 talent by Berlingske business. You can learn more about Betty here.

The prestigious industry research company CB Insights has selected Loadsmart as one of the startups disrupting the supply chain and logistics industry.

In its brief called From Tracking Food To Last-Mile Delivery, 125+ Startups Disrupting The Supply Chain & Logistics Industry, Loadsmart is mentioned in the ‘Trucking Marketplace & Fleet Management’ category.

We couldn’t be here without the hard work of our whole team.

Felipe Capella is Loadsmart’s Co-founder and Chief of Product.

Much like death and taxes, there are two immutable laws in logistics. It will always be a 24/7 industry, and issues will always arise.

For that reason Loadsmart must be able to address any shipment events day and night. At the same time, great service also requires a great team who are performing at their best. This level of performance is not possible if team members can only contribute to exception resolution when they are in front of a computer.

So we built Jarvis – a mobile version of Alice, Loadsmart’s internal TMS. By offering a native mobile version of our TMS we made it possible for anyone in Loadsmart’s Operations Team to respond to issues quickly from anywhere, any time. All responsible parties can jump in to any situation to make sure our customers’ needs are met. This also allows us to keep our team smaller and more nimble, supporting our goal to move more with less.

Loadsmart has been the pioneer on mobile solutions for freight brokerage operations since its inception: from driver apps that track shipment location to apps offering one-click load booking for carriers. This time, by building a mobile version of our TMS, we better service our customers and give more freedom to our team, while keeping the company as efficient as possible.

Jarvis’ interface had to be simple, providing a clear overview of the shipments that are moving through our platform. The contact information of all stakeholders of the shipment are automatically available, in case we need to directly call or message shippers, carriers or warehouses. Each Loadsmart team member can access the app using fingerprint login in their smartphone, ensuring also security of the shipment information.

“By providing a mobile solution to our Load Management team, we are capable of notifying the right person at the right time in case of incidents that need human attention, minimizing response time and offering a better customer support to our clients with the help of technology”, said Gustavo Barbosa, Mobile Lead at Loadsmart.

Loadsmart’s mission is also to make our internal team more efficient, moving more with less.

Loadsmart was invited to speak at the Supply Chain Conference organized by the publication Automotive Logistics in Atlanta. In a panel titled “Clearing the bottlenecks”, Ricardo Salgado, Loadsmart’s CEO, and Ivan Hernandez, Daimler’s Director of Transportation for North America, co-presented a joint project which leveraged Loadsmart’s technology. The project successfully reduced Daimler’s time to execute a spot load from 5 hours to 18 minutes, while increasing Daimler utilization of their carrier customers by 70%.

Aside from Loadsmart and Daimler, the other panelists came from Honda, Toyota, Surgere, and Ryder.

See below a 4-minute excerpt of the presentation outlining the joint project:

Over the last five years, we have been obsessed with introducing new technology to dramatically improve the efficiency of the freight brokerage business. This effort not only includes creating a better experiences for shippers and carriers, but also improving and automating back-office processes.

Every broker receives thousands of documents per month related to ongoing and delivered shipments: Rate Confirmations, BOLs, PODs, Invoices, etc. Identifying, separating, cataloging and uploading each document to the right place takes countless hours, and even the most strict processes result in a non-negligible error rate.

The new feature we just released is a machine learning model that analyzes each email, its attachments, and identifies what documents are contained into a single or multiple PDF files. After automatically scanning and cataloging the content of the files, the system then splits the documents into its component sub-files (e.g. BOLs, Invoices, Rate Confirmations, etc.) and auto-uploads each document to the right shipment folder.
This new feature is saving hundreds of hours per month in document review, and it has dramatically reduced the error rate in classifying documents.

The more automated and efficient we are, the lower operational costs we have, which in turn has meant we offer more attractive prices for shippers and better margins for carriers.

 

Felipe Capella is Co-Founder of Loadsmart

Loadsmart was the first to launch truckload instant pricing/booking in the US (2015); first to launch One-Click load acceptance app for carriers (2015); first to launch instant pricing API for TMS integrations (2016) and experienced the first fully automated quote-book-source flow in the truckload spot market (2016).

We are now providing a pre-spot solution by fully automating quoting and booking of truckload shipments. By doing this, we make it possible for companies to automatically book a truck before the shipment turns into a spot load, accepting 100% of those tenders and guaranteeing capacity. This helps shippers avoid the same-day/next-day markets,  which are known for steep prices and service failures. Here is how it works.

1 – Semi-Automated Pre-Spot

We integrate with the Shipper’s transportation management system (TMS) via API to access data about all shipments that need to be moved. Loadsmart runs each shipment  through our machine learning pricing algorithm and returns a live, bookable rate directly to the Shipper’s TMS.

This allows the shipper to compare the prices from other carriers and brokers, which are logged in their static rate tree, with Loadsmart’s bookable rate. Because it is given real-time, the rate is always live and can be booked with one click. No emails; no phone calls.

That means that when the primary carrier fails, the load planner can execute the shipment right away. Not only does this provide price protection at above-standard service levels, it also creates internal efficiencies for the shipper by saving time for the planners. It goes without saying that this also allows Loadsmart to operate much more efficiently, generating further savings that can be passed along to the customer.

2- Fully Automated Pre-Spot

In a fully-automated flow, instead of the shipper’s load planner manually comparing our pre-spot dynamic prices with static rates from their routing guide, this is done automatically on a server.

There are two steps to the automated process of price discovery and comparison. First, an algorithm evaluates the acceptance rates of carriers and brokers whose static rates are in the route guide. If they have rarely or never agreed to move the load at their routing guide (or annual bid) rate, then the algorithm skips them to save time.

Second, the algorithm requests a real-time rate from the Loadsmart pricing API. It then moves down the routing guide from least expensive to most expensive rate, contacting only carriers who the shipper has reason to believe will respond. It keeps doing this until the next lowest rate is Loadsmart’s instantly bookable rate. At that point, the algorithm automatically tenders the load to Loadsmart via API.

This allows for a full automation experience that in practice reduces the time to identify and secure truckload capacity by as much as several days, increasing on-time delivery and decreasing cost of hire. Further efficiencies accrue to the shipper as either very limited or indeed no manual work is necessary, decreasing errors and human capital costs while optimizing decisions.

We have implemented both semi- and fully-automated pricing and booking  with Fortune 500 companies across the US. Pre-Spot Automation has dramatically accelerated the quoting and booking process (check Daimler’s case), slashing the time required to secure capacity, reducing rates by adding liquidity and reducing dependency on same-day spot markets, and minimizing the risk of human error.

Want to integrate with our system? Let us know.

 

Felipe Capella, Co-founder 

Hunter Yaw, Senior Product Manager