Simplicity — Coyote’s guiding philosophy in its quest to make the diverse marketplace easier to access regardless of the end user — has served the company well. After its founding in 2006, Coyote had quite a decade. By 2014, it was large enough to acquire Access America for an estimated $260 million, and by the next year, UPS (NYSE: UPS) snapped up Coyote for $1.8 billion. Despite a recent workforce setback in its Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Chicago offices, Coyote has doubled in size since its acquisition by UPS.
Advances in technology have empowered Coyote’s focus on simplicity. Automation and increased technological efficiencies will no doubt lead to job losses in the sector. Ironically enough, the cuts may come to brokerages long before they hit the truck driver population through growing use of autonomous trucks. Autonomous trucks get the lion’s share of media attention, but regulatory hurdles alone will keep any transformative industry shift in that arena from happening anytime soon — probably not this decade.
Perhaps anticipating exactly those pain points, Coyote initiated a study, released in late September 2019, suggesting the ideal supply chain is 60% technology and 40% human expertise. The Tech + Humanity study analyzed “which of 13 tasks are best suited for human expertise, which functions can be optimized with technology and which require a combination of both.” Respondents to the survey indicated that human expertise is important when it comes to creative decision-making and strategic-thinking tasks, such as communicating with customers and resolving shipment and delivery problems. Automation, it comes as no surprise, is best positioned to strengthen operational functions, such as managing inventory and booking shipments.
The CoyoteGO app has been available for several years now, leveraging those very technologies to help businesses grow their fleets and discover other opportunities through access to Coyote’s celebrated network of over 10,000 loads per day. According to CarrierList, the company’s tech has the highest “stickiness” rate — the percentage of carriers who downloaded the app and became regular, active users — among carriers of any 3PL and brokerage platforms.
Now, the technology builds on the established carrier app, and on a series of large-scale enhancements to the digital freight platform. These features include last October’s mobile and desktop updates. This expansion of the CoyoteGO digital freight platform further supports the 3PL’s network of shippers and carriers with a centralized digital experience across all users and devices.
“At Coyote, our core goal is to offer the right capacity to shippers and the right freight to carriers, when and where they need it, in the most efficient way possible. The better we can achieve that through new technology innovations, the more value we can provide to both sides of the market,” said Brian Work, chief technology officer, in a prepared statement. “The expansion of CoyoteGO represents one of the ways we’re integrating digital solutions at critical stages throughout the shipping process, from quoting through settlement, to foster a better experience for all users.”