Chattanooga, Tennessee-based supply chain intelligence platform SONAR announced a data partnership with Transfix, a New York City-based technology and data solutions provider for the logistics industry.
SONAR’s extensive datasets on the truckload market, including rates, volumes and capacity information, will be used as inputs for Transfix’s Data Solutions suite, a machine learning and AI-enabled platform for brokers that allows them to quickly respond to RFPs with confidence, and win freight at sustainable margins.
“In this freight environment, there is a sector-wide emphasis on prioritizing pricing solutions that improve margins and increase revenue,” Jonathan Salama, co-founder and CEO of Transfix, told FreightWaves. “Our product suite directly addresses this need, focusing on everything from cost prediction to bidding on RFPs or spot freight, arming customers with dynamic, more accurate data-driven solutions. We’re thrilled to partner with SONAR to amplify these offerings with powerful market insights that will inform our data models and predictive tools. We believe that brokers that harness and activate their data can gain an edge during RFP season and beyond, and we’re thrilled to join forces with SONAR to help make that happen for brokers across the country.”
Transfix, which was founded in 2014 as an early digital freight broker, had previously built automated matching and pricing for its own operations by offering transportation management systems to shippers and fleet management software to carriers.
“Transfix really has the best-in-breed in transportation management and a framework for analyzing optimal network design and making choices that will result in a two-digit operating ratio,” said Daniel Pickett, SONAR’s chief technology officer. “SONAR is best-in-breed data and forward-looking analytics. We have a certain set of expertise; Transfix has a certain expertise. Putting our data in their platform is going to help people make better long-term decisions.”
Now Transfix is helping freight brokers solve one of the thorniest problems in the transportation industry: price discovery, a process that brokerages have historically muddled through with a combination of endless phone calls, outdated data and guesswork. Manually filling out rates on thousands of lanes for RFPs consumed hours of time, and the outcome was very uncertain.
“Today the rate-finding process is very much a game of Marco Polo,” Pickett said. “By getting the tender data and market data and running it through their rate calculation algorithms, Transfix is going to give people multiple data points. It will allow brokers to think beyond the next load and ask themselves, ‘How should I prioritize my day? What should I be expecting on this lane? How should I manage my customer relationships?’”
Transfix’s Data Solutions allows brokers to model their contract and spot rates into the future, weaving market data into their historical transaction data to generate the most accurate forecasts. Not only does the platform give brokers the rates they need, but it also helps them triage lanes by desirability and predict how their entire freight portfolio will perform.
“Transfix has been a long-term partner, dating back to their earliest days as the first digital broker,” said Spencer Piland, CFO and COO of SONAR, in a statement. “We’re excited to be a part of this journey with them and their exceptional data and technology teams as they showcase to our industry how to improve pricing models and apply freight market data to improve decisions and drive margins for America’s largest brokers.”
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