Typically, we focus on trends in freight (like produce season) and the DAT systems that can help you manage those trends. Apologies in advance, this article is going to focus on the technical.
Operating a freight brokerage, 3PL, or 4PL is more than just the type of freight you manage, pricing, and carrier relationships. While critical to your business, how you do those things and how long it takes to do those things are equally important.
Enter technology like your TMS and your internal systems. Those systems are only as good as the data feeding into them. Enter DAT.
DAT’s platforms and products are cloud-based SaaS solutions. That means that they are continually updated with new data. That also means that you don’t have to use our UI (User Interface) to access that data or post your own data. That data can be pulled or sent in real-time via our available APIs.
If you’re unfamiliar with APIs, think of them as a phone call. I call you when I need something (or a piece of data), you answer in real time and return that piece of data. What if you wanted to post a load or send over a piece of data (like contributions)? You might place the phone call to DAT to send us the data to post. There are nuances to the type of phone call (SOAP versus rest-based APIs), but largely that’s the essence of APIs.
How do APIs work with your TMS? If you have a homegrown TMS, you likely have a team of developers, whether in-house or contracted, that is building out these integrations. We are happy to partner with you (or your team) to figure out what APIs work best and answer any questions you may have.
If you are buying a TMS (think McLeod, Aljex, Revenova or DAT’s own Broker TMS), those integrations are built by those TMS providers. We partner with all sorts of TMS providers and have a list of the integrations available.
In real-world terms, many brokerages are pulling our historical rates into their TMS to help their team on the floor make real-time pricing decisions, they might be pulling load-to-truck ratios to get a sense of market tightness or looseness on a transaction, they could be sending us data to post a load in DAT One, or adding carriers that are prioritized in their TMS to DAT’s Private Network.
What if you don’t want a single data point but a multitude of data points? For example, what if you want a year’s worth of historical rates instead of just one historical rate on a given lane? You might need this for your internal pricing algorithm or historical benchmarking. We provide that through integrations with Snowflake or other file delivery methods that integrate with TMSs and other providers.
We are in a difficult market. Having a team that is efficient and productive is one of the keys to surviving and maximizing margin. One way to do that is feeding information to your TMS, creating fewer clicks for your team, and minimizing the time spent trying to pull information from disparate systems (and instead having it all in 1 system).
Reach out to your customer success rep or account manager with any questions or to talk about how DAT can integrate with your systems.
