Transportation, brokerage, and third-party-logistics (3PL) giant C.H. Robinson is continuing its push into digital operations, saying today that it has built software integrations with 19 separate transportation management system (TMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms in a bid to help shippers better manage supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic.
The additional products will all link into the company’s “Navisphere” multimodal TMS, offering access to real-time pricing and capacity assurance and supporting a “virtually instantaneous” process of getting market quotes and booking loads, Eden Prairie, Minn.-based C.H. Robinson said.
By automating the load-booking process, the company says it provides greater flexibility and efficiencies for shippers who face changing customer buying habits and supply chain disruptions due to Covid-19. C.H. Robinson’s own digital transactions are up 55% compared to a year ago – reinforcing that customers have a desire to further automate, the company says.
The announcement follows a flurry of recent moves by the 115-year-old company to apply 21st century digital tools to manage its transportation heft, which spans nearly $20 billion in freight under management and 18 million shipments managed annually. In July, the company said it had linked its Navisphere TMS to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure IoT Central to integrate Internet of Things (IoT) device monitoring into its operations. Also this summer, it unveiled a brokerage partnership with freight marketplace startup FleetOps, after launching an innovation incubator called C.H. Robinson Labs in January and a web-based shipping tool called Freightquote in November.
With the latest announcement, customers can stay in their own systems to get real-time rates for multi-modal solutions across both truckload (TL) and less-than-truckload (LTL), tapping into data from platforms including: Blue Yonder, Oracle Transportation Management, Oracle NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
“Without C.H. Robinson’s capacity assurance, the process would be like shopping online and hitting purchase when there may be no inventory to buy,” Mac Pinkerton, president of C.H. Robinson’s North American Surface Transportation division, said in a release. “We are proud to offer this unprecedented assurance along with other game-changing benefits such as providing real-time market rates, delivered by our unmatched network size and information advantage, to create savings and efficiencies in the transportation management process. Adding to the benefits is that shippers can access these capabilities within the tool they are already using to manage their transportation needs.”
