Since its founding 40 years ago as a freight brokerage serving agriculture and commodity shippers, Ryan Transportation has developed into a family of brands delivering comprehensive transportation, finance, and technology solutions to customers. During that time, its network has expanded to thousands of carriers across all modes and equipment types that move freight throughout North America. Internally, its support teams have grown to more than 700 logistics professionals.
As often happens, this rapid growth put a strain on the company’s legacy workflows, prompting it to begin looking into automated solutions that would streamline freight quoting and execution.
A SPOT-ON SOLUTION
Ryan Transportation’s search for a digital tool led it to Tabi Connect, an automated rate management and freight quoting platform that had recently integrated with technology company ShipperGuide’s artificial intelligence (AI)-native transportation management system (TMS).
An AI-powered platform, Tabi Connect helps logistics service providers automate and optimize pricing decisions at scale. By integrating with shipper TMS platforms, APIs (application programming interfaces), RPA (robotic process automation) workflows, and email, Tabi Connect centralizes inbound quote requests into a single intelligent system and replaces manual data entry with AI-driven business rules that can be updated instantly using plain English.
In addition, the platform centralizes all quoting data into a real-time system of record and uses AI-powered analytics to surface insights in plain English across shippers, lanes, and margins, with built-in governance and auditability, according to the company.
By combining ShipperGuide’s API processing speed with its real-time rate control, Tabi Connect gives users a way to eliminate the friction associated with manual operations, according to the developer. That processing speed also promises to transform the way brokers handle rejected loads. Rather than rushing to the loadboard for an alternative when a primary carrier rejects a tender, Tabi Connect’s platform allows API-connected brokers to respond instantly with pricing that reflects current market conditions. For operations teams managing high load volumes, this integration offers a more reliable alternative to chasing freight on the open market, the company says.
“Brokers that are now leveraging APIs are going to be in a much better position when the market tightens,” said Ricky Gonzalez, chief executive officer at Tabi Connect, in a press release. “The brokers who have these connections in place are winning freight. The ones who don’t are watching it go to someone else. This partnership is about making sure our customers are on the right side of that.”
CATALYST FOR SUCCESS
Ryan Transportation was one of the first brokerages to go live with Tabi Connect’s platform, and in the first month of deployment, the company saw spot bidding opportunities increase and bookings double. In addition, more than 90% of loads were priced via API.
The results Ryan Transportation achieved in month one are a concrete example of what that access can mean in practice, according to the software developer. “We built our platform around the idea that fast, reliable access to capacity should be the baseline,” said Giovanni Battistella, vice president of ShipperGuide at Loadsmart, in the release. “Ryan Transportation was up and running in one week. That speed allows brokers to see immediate ROI [return on investment] and scale without heavy upfront resource commitments.”
