Transflo customers can receive a free AscendTMS premium subscription for a limited time under a partnership agreement between Transflo and InMotion Global, makers of the transportation management software (TMS). Transflo customers eligible for the free subscription include carriers, brokers, third-party logistics providers and shippers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
“As AscendTMS is already the most widely used TMS software in North America, this deep Transflo integration allows us to facilitate a perfect harmony between back-office dispatchers and front-office drivers across tens of thousands of our joint customers and for millions of active drivers,” Tim Higham, president of AscendTMS, said in a statement.
Higham noted that Transflo’s driver app has been downloaded over 1.9 million times and has over 500,000 active drivers on the platform. In all, Transflo digitizes and processes over 800 million freight documents annually.
“This seamless AscendTMS alignment with Transflo means the entire carrier, broker and shipper market can now immediately achieve 100% digital freight tendering, digital freight tracking, digital in-cab driver/dispatcher communication, digital POD document capture and delivery, and instant digital payments, at little to no cost, in one single core TMS software platform that’s available to anyone,” Higham said.
The agreement between the companies provides the AscendTMS for free for three months before regular monthly pricing begins, Higham said. Transflo offers small and medium-size businesses pricing plans for its Transflo Mobile+ for carriers and Velocity+ for brokers with the Ascend TMS.
AscendTMS has reached a series of integration agreements over the past year, including deals with Hubtek, Trucker Tools and most recently Love’s. That last agreement gives all Love’s Financial customers access to a full premium subscription of the AscendTMS for free. Higham told FreightWaves these integrations are very important to providing the services for which customers are asking.
“Our users keep asking us to add XYZ service into their AscendTMS account all the time,” he said. “When enough ask for the same service, we do the work for them and thus everyone gets it. We don’t charge the AscendTMS user to add these added services/integrations. The more we add, the more ‘digital’ everyone can be.”
The digitization of the logistics market is part of the reason Transflo was interested in the deal.
“The future of freight movement is without question going to be 100% digital,” Doug Schrier, Transflo’s vice president of product and innovation, said in a statement. “Our transformative partnership with AscendTMS means that the entire logistics market can access all the tools they need to immediately achieve their digital goals and, like the very largest freight market participants, they can instantly experience the benefits of fully digital operations and freight movements.”
“In the SMB space (fewer than 100 trucks for carriers or less than $50 million in freight spend for brokers/shippers) the market truly struggles to become truly digital as they just don’t have the expertise or the money,” Higham explained. “So, AscendTMS is perfect as their digital back-office solution and Transflo is the perfect digital front-office solution [for the drivers] as it’s already on over 500,000 drivers’ phones and they move over 800 million freight documents already from those drivers back to their back office.”
AscendTMS is active on nearly 30,000 accounts and in 21 countries. According to Higham, 80% of users identify as primarily asset carriers, 15% are primarily brokers/3PLs, and 5% are primarily shippers.
“However, we find that most users play at least two roles,” Higham noted. “For example, with our carrier customers, just over 67% turn on the AscendTMS brokerage features, too, meaning that most carriers using AscendTMS broker freight from time to time.”
Click for more FreightWaves articles by Brian Straight.
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