Parade unveils new capacity management and pricing tools

Whether it’s certain lanes or carrier partnerships, every brokerage has some kind of advantage in the marketplace. Whatever your strengths, leaning into them is your best move.

But fully utilizing your carrier network is easier said than done, even more so when you use disparate capacity management platforms.

The reality is that freight brokerages left in information silos have little chance to maximize capacity and build out their carrier relationships.

This no longer has to be the case. Now, freight brokerages can maximize capacity and develop carrier relationships like never before.

Parade is celebrating the release of two new products to its Capacity Management Plus plan to help freight brokerages instantly better manage their dedicated capacity and price quotes: a capacity-based pricing engine, Advantage, and an intelligent waterfall tendering engine, Cascade.

“We serve the broader freight brokerage base, the rest of the midmarket freight brokers who don’t necessarily have access to that level of research and development spend,” said Anthony Sutardja, CEO and co-founder of Parade. “This is important because shippers are changing the way they do business, as they’re moving towards API-based rating to procure freight. We want to make sure that every freight broker can participate in this digital transformation.”

Parade’s capacity-based pricing tool, Advantage, shows brokerages where they have an edge over their competition in the market.

Depending on the depth of the capacity network, it’s not uncommon for brokerages to pay significantly below or above the market average on a given lane.

But with Advantage, brokers can see how much more or less than the market they can expect to pay. Parade utilizes data from a freight broker’s carrier network to generate an instant predicted in-network carrier rate and recommended shipper bid rate.

“With Advantage, all known carrier relationships and capacity is automatically computed so that shippers receive a more prescriptive rate that matches what they can actually fulfill,” Sutardja said. 

These carrier relationships are further strengthened with Cascade. Parade’s waterfall tendering tool prioritizes carrier outreach for specific loads by factoring in lane, equipment and shipper preferences. Cascade makes it easier for brokers to offer their primary carriers exclusive access to loads before matching with carriers in the brokers’ broader network.

“Cascade automatically detects all the key lanes for the broker, using AI to make recommendations on which lanes to automate,” Sutardja said.

Though brokers have always had a plan for who they would prefer to move their freight, Sutardja notes that the process is extremely repetitive, “sometimes taking hours to move this freight, even though the path of which carrier you want to use is already known.”

Eliminating these manual workflows does more than just improve carrier reuse. Brokers can expect margins to increase, too, as the tool improves the level of service to both shippers and carriers. 

“Our team is focused on helping our freight brokerage partners leverage digital workflows with their teams to maximize capacity and develop carrier relationships,” Sutardja said. “We are excited to see our customers unlock new growth with these innovations.”

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Editor: Jack Glenn