Supply chain software vendor Blue Yonder has integrated its platform with the digital freight technology company Loadsmart, saying the combination will allow transportation management customers to significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency.
By linking Scottsdale, Arizona-based Blue Yonder’s transportation management system (TMS) software with New York-based Loadsmart’s digital freight matching technology, the partners say they can offer customers access both to Loadsmart’s instantly bookable truckload rates and to Blue Yonder’s dynamic pricing discovery solution that generates guaranteed capacity.
For example, when a primary carrier declines a shipment and the load hits the routing guide, a real-time rate from Loadsmart will now be dynamically inserted in advance of the next best option. Once the next lowest rate is uploaded from Loadsmart, the load can be automatically tendered with 100% acceptance.
“Transportation is becoming increasingly digitized and shippers have realized there is an opportunity to improve operational efficiencies by better integrating systems and processes with their 3PL and carrier counterparts,” Hunter Yaw, vice president of product management at Loadsmart, said in a release. “With the Blue Yonder-Loadsmart integration, shared customers will be able to retrieve timely, competitive truckload rates for every shipment in seconds. Shippers can then tender the load automatically using Blue Yonder’s solution.”
Loadsmart, which is backed by tens of millions of dollars in venture capital from the investment arm of shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk and other firms, has also linked its platform with TMS platforms from BluJay Solutions and other providers.
Blue Yonder—which was formerly known as JDA Software Group Inc.—also recently landed new investment when electronics retailer Panasonic said in May it had bought one-fifth of the company, saying that the 20% strategic equity investment built on a 2019 joint venture between the two firms in Japan. The investment firms New Mountain Capital and Blackstone will continue to be the majority shareholders of Blue Yonder. “Modern day supply chains face a number of challenges including rapidly shifting demand, hyper-personalization of consumer needs, labor shortages, and operational inefficiencies, so by further developing our relationship with supply chain software specialists Blue Yonder, I believe we will be able to make larger, more transformative contributions to a greater number of customers,” Yasu Higuchi, representative director of Panasonic Corp. and CEO of Panasonic’s Connected Solutions Company, said in a release at the time.
