Arrive Logistics, a freight brokerage and multimodal third-party logistics provider based in Austin, Texas, has unveiled its proprietary transportation management system, ARRIVEnow. ARRIVEnow’s unified back end powers highly automated internal workflows on Arrive’s brokerage floor as well as serves up data to and transacts with carriers and shippers through their own dedicated web portals.
“ARRIVEnow is the culmination of our internal software development,” explained Michael Senftleber, Arrive’s chief technology officer. “We started about four years ago building onto an internal proprietary TMS, and as we were building out the foundation, the core of the system, what was so important was that we were building a TMS that made sense for Arrive. ARRIVEnow takes Arrive’s processes and instantiates them in software so we can continue to grow and scale.”
Senftleber added that while ARRIVEnow might have started as a somewhat low-profile internal initiative, it’s now graduated to become the operating system for the entire company, rolling up information gleaned from individual loads into Arrive’s enterprise resource planning system, Netsuite, and its human resources platform, Workday.
Internally, one of the most important metrics for ARRIVEnow’s success is the company’s Automation Index. Each shipment that passes through Arrive’s system reaches a number of time-consuming, manual and error-prone points in the standard workflow, places where Arrive’s software engineers have tried to speed things up and reduce inefficiencies. Arrive’s Automation Index tracks how many of these points are automated for a given load and how many loads have some form of automation. Today, for instance, approximately 90% of Arrive’s loads have at least one significant automated component and 65% have at least two touch points automated — projected to be 72% by the end of the year.
One of those points is the matching decision: finding the best carrier for the load based on the data attributes attached to the load. ARRIVEnow works to minimize deadhead and has already saved 90 million kilograms of CO2 emissions this year, according to a company statement.
“We have a co-pilot model, where we develop technology to make our people more productive and efficient,” Senftleber said. Across all tenure bands, Arrive’s loads per broker per day have doubled in the past two years.
Senftleber himself came to Arrive three and a half years ago from the software industry and built Arrive’s 250-person-strong technology organization to resemble a tech company, complete with product managers, engineers, developers, UX designers, quality assurance and scrum-based sprints.
“Absolutely everything we have today has been built from the ground up in the last four years,” Senftleber said.
ARRIVEnow is more than just an internal TMS or workflow automation initiative — it also connects Arrive to its carriers and shippers. Arrive has long preferred to work with small and midsize carriers that are a bit larger than the archetypal one or two tractor owner-operator fleet, so the technology it built for the carrier side of the market is less for drivers and more for dispatchers and planners.
“As we built out ARRIVEnow Carrier, we wanted to understand what they’re looking for,” Senftleber said. “Are they repetitively looking for the same thing in the system? If so, then let’s serve that up. If they know where their trucks are, let’s help them match, but also show them historical loads, payment status, give the ability to upload documents. And they have visibility into their committed capacity routing guide and see what lanes they’ve committed.”
Owner-operators and independent drivers, on the other hand, often wanted quick pay functionality and other features more suited to a solo operation. Arrive partnered with TriumphPay on a quick pay solution last year. Today, 30% of all Arrive loads are booked through the ARRIVEnow Carrier portal.
The other important piece of connectivity in the ARRIVEnow ecosystem is the shipper portal, which is especially designed for small and midsized businesses. Senftleber explained that enterprise shippers have made substantial investments in API and EDI integrations to their ERP systems and that those sorts of direct connections will likely always be how Arrive gets the majority of its freight from the largest shippers. Still, Arrive’s web portal makes it easy for a planner to get a quick quote on a shipment if he or she doesn’t have time to call a rep at Arrive or quickly look up paperwork for a specific load.
“The shipper portal is a convenience for enterprise shippers, but we think it will really hit its sweet spot with SMB shippers,” Senftleber said. “They may have somewhat inconsistent freight and not many good relationships with carriers and brokers. They need to find a decent price and easily build a load.”
Arrive’s shipper portal is currently in beta, with approximately 25 shippers participating in the testing.
“This announcement is the culmination of years of hard work building one of the most effective platforms in the industry,” said Matt Pyatt, CEO and co-founder of Arrive Logistics. “There are over 250 engineers, data scientists, technologists and product management professionals behind ARRIVEnow who easily rival the talent and output of any organization inside or outside the industry. 2023 is going to be another big year of driving results for our partners and team.”