On February 24, 2022, Parade VP of Customer Experience Elise Le met up with Tai TMS VP of Sales and Marketing Sean McGillicuddy and Fortune Logistics Executive Regional Manager Tyler Gilpin for a Freightwaves webinar entitled The Modern Freight Brokerage: Parade and Tai Pair Up To Help Brokerages Scale and Step Into the Future of Freight. Here’s a rundown on what they discussed.
Parade, Tai TMS, and Fortune Logistics Webinar Recap
In today’s freight market, it’s more important than ever for freight brokers to mitigate risks and find ways to take advantage of the massive freight volume while it’s here. Parade and Tai’s partnership works so well because both companies have very similar missions: helping their customers grow and thrive through flexible automation. This presentation covers how these technology companies are doing just that for Fortune Logistics, a freight brokerage that has used both programs to achieve major gains in just a few months.
How Parade Works
In the webinar, Elise Le talks about how Parade works. Here’s what she had to say.
The Parade platform is specifically designed for freight brokers to digitize their operations. It layers over their existing TMS and follows the workflows they’re already using so they can keep working with very little interruption to their day.
Parade offers integrations with onboarding systems and other programs so lane preferences and other information can move automatically into the Parade system, where brokers can interact on Parade’s platform or through their TMS.
The data Parade extracts via AI from historical load data, emails, quotes, and tribal knowledge from other systems is used to identify the best carriers for each load presented in a ranked list. The system also sends automated emails out to the best candidates and sends loads out to public and private load boards. When carriers see the load, they can send in a quote digitally or utilize the Book Now if they’re in the broker’s carrier network.
Parade Benefits:
· It gets smarter as you use it
· Interactions become more purposeful
· Loads can get covered faster, more loads booked per day, more RFP bids can be placed because brokers know they have capacity and carriers to cover things since the system remembers every carrier
The ultimate goal is digital freight bookings (which Parade refers to as Book Now loads). This saves time and lets carriers book outside of business hours, pushing freight to carriers without reps having to do anything at all.
Parade does this by going out to the places that carriers already go so brokers don’t have to fight an uphill battle to gain adoption or try to change carrier behavior.
How Parade and Tai TMS Work Together
Tai TMS customers can use many of the features of Parade without ever leaving their Smart Dashboard. One of the most impactful ways that Parade and Tai work together is carrier outreach. The combination of systems allows brokers to automate the carrier outreach process, leaving more time for reps to focus on building relationships with those carriers instead of making transactions.
The data and automation that Parade and Tai bring to the table mean that a new rep can achieve the same results that an experienced rep could before. That’s possible because processes are more streamlined with as few clicks as possible, other systems are integrated to improve data while cutting down on data entry, and brokerages can choose their level of automation with both systems to find new processes that work for their business.
Key Tai TMS Statistics
· The average brokerage sees a 30% increase in freight volume in the first year of use
· Tai TMS brokerages can save an average of 11 hours per week per rep by automating processes
· Implementing Tai takes, on average, 30 days
· By adding Parade to Tai, freight volumes often increase by 50% or more
Fortune Logistics’ Journey to Digitization with Parade and Tai
Fortune Logistics, an FTL reefer broker based in Sioux Falls, SD, is the poster child for Parade and Tai TMS integration. They’ve realized huge gains in productivity and revenue since they implemented both systems at the tail end of 2021.
Many of their reps have doubled the number of loads they book per week, carrier re-use is up 25%, revenues and margins are up, and they recently had more digital bookings in a week than manual bookings with 52% of loads being Book Nows. That was a goal they’d hoped to achieve by Q3, but they’ve been able to achieve it much sooner due to enthusiastic adoption of new processes and hard work being put in to train the Parade system to better support reps.
How did they manage that enthusiastic buy-in? Their reps earn commission based on the metrics that are important to Fortune, so they have every incentive to use the systems to improve their numbers and keep carrier preferences updated so Parade can do its best work.
“We have carriers that are partners now, not just transactions,” said Tyler Gilpin of Fortune.
Want to learn more about how Fortune has used Parade and Tai TMS to automate their operations and improve essentially every KPI they measure? You can watch the full webinar on-demand here.