When Microsoft veteran Chris Poelma started as chief executive officer of Houston-based transportation management system provider PCS Software in January 2020, he saw a big opportunity for growth and value creation. PCS is an incumbent in the FreightTech industry, having been founded in 1997 to serve asset-based trucking carriers, and over the years had accumulated an enormous amount of data and industry expertise that could be leveraged for the benefit of a broader user base.
“The software industry had grown and matured during PCS’ history,” Poelma told FreightWaves. “PCS was still working primarily with smaller fleets and owner-operators. I saw an opportunity to go up to the midmarket and immediately get a return on investment. We had an ability to take an enormous amount of data, add machine learning and AI technology and data scientists, and create something that would help not just small carriers but midmarket carriers. That’s become our sweet spot over the last couple of years.”
Although PCS didn’t provide specific revenue numbers, Poelma said that the company has grown 3-4x over the past four years and added head count to its “hometown team” without offshoring. It’s a point of pride for PCS that its software engineering and development teams are in Houston, right next to some of the company’s oldest customers.
Poelma quickly set to work, expanding PCS’ capabilities. At the end of 2020, PCS acquired UltrashipTMS, a software-as-a-service platform focused on private fleet management in the food and agriculture industries as well as offering supply chain solutions for retail, packaging and other industries. PCS’ shipper product is most efficient at helping eliminate deadhead and driving asset utilization in private fleets, but it’s also starting to unlock collaboration between private fleets belonging to different shippers.
Meanwhile, PCS’ core product offering was growing in complexity and capability, offering integrations to visibility, enterprise resource planning, accounting, payroll, factoring, fuel and carrier onboarding. Visibility is a robust capability for PCS, Poelma said, because the TMS pulls data from direct integrations to 18 different ELD providers and several white-labeled real-time visibility solution providers, and then cross-checks and refines the results to deliver the most accurate data possible.
The C-suite also got a makeover. Poelma added Chief Technology Officer Yusuf Ozturk, formerly CTO of Rand McNally, and Chief Revenue Officer Ted Pardee, who was at Premise Data and Accela. Most recently, Poelma hired Brett Bowman to be chief financial officer. Bowman has led three companies to successful acquisitions from the CFO’s chair, selling Securonix to Vista Equity Partners, Main Street Hub to GoDaddy, and Woot.com to Amazon. Before his corporate career, Bowman won a Bronze Star during Operation Desert Storm as a U.S. Army officer.
With growing user bases on both the carrier and shipper sides of the market — PCS’ shipper customers include Tyson and Perdue, among many others — the next step was to figure out how to make it easier for carriers, brokers and shippers to connect to each other.
In July 2022, PCS Software launched Prime Express, its unified platform for shippers and carriers geared toward optimizing load-planning based on data from both sides of the house. Prime Express matches loads to drivers by calculating a number of variables, including the physical location of transportation assets, hours of service, service-level agreements and equipment specifications.
“We had done a lot of work in the company bringing the two platforms together in launching Prime Express — the unified platform for shippers and carriers,” Poelma said. “When you look at the landscape across a few thousand data tables, we have data on ports of call, prominent shippers you have to connect to via EDI, payroll, accounting, tax forms, and we’re integrated into over 100 partners via standard APIs on our platform. [The CTO] Yusuf took a look at the way we navigate and bring this to market and asked how can we as a company unlock the potential right out of the gate, so they can get the most ROI and benefit from being on the software.”
Most recently, PCS launched FreightNet, a free network that allows any carrier — after an automated vetting process — to create a carrier profile so that shippers using PCS’ TMS can easily transact with them. Carriers fill out information regarding their assets, lanes, equipment and other preferences, which enables PCS’ recommendation engine to match them to loads created by its shipper customers.
“Carriers give us lanes they prefer and other information, our software does half a dozen fundamental quality checks — insurance, FMCSA — and once they pass that pending state, they become available in our TMS for existing shippers to dispatch loads and other carriers to broker to,” Poelma explained. “We don’t charge for this and hundreds of carriers have registered in the past four weeks.”
PCS is raising its ambitions at an interesting time in the FreightTech industry. The dream of assembling and collating data on the critical mass of shipments and transportation assets necessary for truly automated, truly efficient matching and pricing is an old one. Attempts have been made by everyone from visibility providers like 10-4 Systems and project44 to digital brokerages like Uber Freight and Convoy.
Poelma is betting that an incumbent TMS provider with a deep tech stack and perhaps an even deeper data lake is actually in the best position to reach for the brass ring. The acquisitions and integration work PCS has already done is a promising start, and the new roster Poelma has brought on may be the right team to sell into — and build for — enterprise shippers in a broader range of industry verticals.
“It’s one thing to have the best mouse trap,” Poelma said, “but it’s a whole other thing to be able to present it and share it in a way that can be understood and used by the market.”
LLR Partners’ capital infusion into PCS last September is accelerating this new go-to-market push, too — Poelma finds the private equity firm, which has counted Magaya in its portfolio companies, to be a productive partner with practical knowledge of what works in logistics technology.
“They’re not just money,” Poelma said. “They understand the logistics space and held lots of other brands in this space and still do. Capstreet and LLR are smart money with awesome operating teams. What they do for us and our customers is help us expand our level of professional delivery in market, our global capability and reach, our discipline, and standardization.”