Chicago-based freight brokerage MoLo Solutions on Tuesday morning announced that MasterMind, Mastery Logistics Systems’ transportation management system (TMS), had gone live. MoLo is in the process of switching from its legacy TMS provider and migrated about 20% of its business into MasterMind beginning on Nov. 15.
For approximately the past year, MoLo served as a crucial “beta customer” for Mastery Logistics System, which was founded in 2019 by Jeff Silver, formerly of American Backhaulers, C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW), Coyote Logistics and UPS (NYSE: UPS). MoLo is helmed by CEO Andrew Silver, Jeff’s son and a Coyote veteran himself, and President Matthew Vogrich.
MoLo has grown quickly since its founding in 2017. In the third quarter of 2020, MoLo recorded $78 million in gross revenue, putting the young brokerage on an annual run rate of $312 million. MoLo is Mastery’s third publicly named customer, after publicly traded truckload carriers Schneider (NYSE: SNDR) and Werner Enterprises (NASDAQ: WERN).
“It would be impossible to do what we’ve done with MasterMind without a customer who is willing to provide the resources and users to test the product, and that’s where MoLo came in,” Silver said in a statement. “It’s been exciting to see the software come to life in the hands of people who need it, and we’re appreciative to those at MoLo who have been testing the product as we’ve built it out and as we continue to add automation and capability to the system in the next few months. We’re looking forward to seeing MoLo grow alongside MasterMind.”
In July, Mastery CEO Jeff Silver said that MasterMind enabled asset-based truckload carriers to broker freight with company drivers and third-party drivers, passing loads back and forth seamlessly. That flexibility was important to Mastery’s first customer, Schneider, which will implement MasterMind first in its power-only brokerage, where it uses a combination of Schneider and third-party drivers to move its fleet of 38,000 orange boxes.
MoLo does not own assets, but in a conversation with FreightWaves, MoLo Chief Product Officer Jack Twyman said that MasterMind’s capabilities would allow MoLo to expand its service offerings to customers — he called out less-than-truckload freight, intermodal and working with private fleets — while helping its carrier partners make more money and driving efficiency internally.
“There are so many manual tasks that are eliminated or fully automated with MasterMind,” Twyman said. “That makes our people more productive and gives them a higher quality of life. When they’re able to be more productive, that enables them to find better loads for our carriers and better carriers for our customers. Carriers get access to better revenue, communication and earlier access to loads because we build them faster, and it translates into a better experience for our customers as well.”
Twyman said that in MoLo’s previous TMS, the process of getting a carrier set up with a visibility solution provider took about 15 clicks, but MasterMind does it automatically.
“If you book a load for a customer that has one of those requirements, it’s automatically set up that way,” Twyman said. “Triaging issues with connectivity, cellphones or ELD providers has become so much more intuitive, and we’re excited to see the impact on our scorecards.”
Another major advance, Twyman said, was MasterMind’s ability to provide internal reporting tools to MoLo’s operators. Successfully executing large contracted awards at high service levels depends on a brokerage’s ability to closely track its own performance ahead of a shipper’s scorecard and analyze issues in its processes that may cause problems. MasterMind, Twyman said, allows MoLo’s operators, regardless of their team, to log in and instantly see all the loads they’re associated with, any exceptions and the next scheduled events for their loads.
“All of our freight is stored in a centralized location and every user has access to the same information,” Twyman said. “The screens are set up in an intuitive way; in our previous system, it took hundreds of reports to accomplish that same level of visibility. We can take action quickly — I’ve never seen that level of efficiency before.”
Mastery’s engineers came to MoLo and shadowed its operators, reviewing the brokerage’s current systems and processes and learning how MoLo’s teams execute freight, communicate and manage exceptions. Early in the process, Twyman said, the focus was on identifying the critical pieces of information that MoLo’s operators needed to make decisions and designing the insights and features that could accelerate further productivity. His responsibility was to ensure that the collaborative process yielded a product that “solved problems for our people, carriers and shippers.”
The next step in MoLo’s implementation of MasterMind will be to migrate the bulk of its business, which is based on EDI and API connections with its customers. That involves getting MoLo’s data into a warehouse so it can be configured and manipulated in order to execute business and perform analytics.
“We have a lot of people testing this out in preview environments,” Twyman said. “We have production data in [MoLo’s previous TMS] being forked to this test environment, and our people are getting in there, banging around and trying to break things. Interactions at the customer level can vary pretty significantly and we’re making sure we account for that. Having a system that’s flexible enough to adhere to those varied requirements is really important and not something that you go live with in broad strokes and say you’ll just figure out.”