FreightWaves SONAR provides transparency to simplify decision making across transportation teams.
Now, SONAR has added features, which went live Thursday, designed to increase pricing efficiency and strategy effectiveness for transportation teams everywhere. Users of Market Dashboard and Market Dashboard+ can now unlock the freshest contract rate data and market demand signals.
Contract rates now available
Contract rates are the rates paid to carriers and brokers by a shipper, which provides granular clarity into overall freight spend on individual lanes. Users will be able to visualize and compare the contract rate with the Trusted Rate Assessment Consortium (TRAC) spot rate in a given lane and understand the volume of contract loads being referenced. Contract rates are all-in rates per mile including fuel, similar to how TRAC data is displayed today.
By comparing spot rates to contract rates, transportation teams can quickly see supply-and-demand dynamics and trends in the trucking industry or create opportunities for margin.
Additionally, comparing spot rates to contract rates can help shippers and carriers make more informed decisions about pricing and capacity planning. Shippers can use this information to decide whether to book shipments on the spot market or negotiate longer-term contracts with carriers. Carriers and brokers can also benefit by adjusting their pricing strategies and optimize their capacity utilization.
A new round of TRAC contributors
A new round of contributors have been added to the TRAC, which increases the scope and accuracy of the most up-to-date spot rate data in the industry.
TRAC covers more than 1 million unique van or reefer lanes and is updated daily with actual booking data from roughly 25 of the largest brokers and 3PLs. As TRAC grows and becomes more refined, transportation teams continue to increase pricing accuracy and reduce time spent on decision making or validation.
TRAC rates are unique in comparison to other industry spot-rate sources in that the data is typically less than 24 hours old, which improves accuracy and efficiency for SONAR users.
More actionable demand signals
Additionally, new data has been added in Market Dashboard+ to help customers see day-over-day and week-over-week changes to understand price movements at the lane level while analyzing volumes of lanes simultaneously. These metadata sources, along with market-level tender rejection data, aim to remove the guesswork from pricing strategies and help SONAR users make the most informed decisions.
As SONAR users explore more data sources and apply them to their own unique businesses, they will be able to create better strategies around budgeting, bidding and operating freight flows.
For more information about SONAR or to request a demo, click here.
