A Transportation Management System

A managed transportation management system gives you the full capability of an enterprise TMS, rate shopping, tendering, tracking, freight audit, and spend analytics, but our logistics team operates the platform for you instead of handing you a login. The difference is service versus software. If you would rather license the technology and staff it yourself, that is a product like Atlas TMS or our control tower software; the managed service is us running that engine on your freight. Licensing software yourself means owning the whole burden: a lengthy implementation, integration mapping, routing-guide configuration, and the analysts to run it daily. The managed model strips that out. You bring your lanes, carriers, and rates; we stand up the system, connect your ERP, tune the rules, and execute. You get lower cost and clean reporting without becoming a systems administrator or funding a logistics-technology team.

It attacks cost from several directions at once. Rate shopping compares every load across your carrier base and modes so the best-value option wins instead of the default carrier, which alone typically returns 5% to 10% on freight spend. Automated tendering with fallback routing keeps loads on the cheapest compliant carrier even when the first choice declines. Mode optimization catches shipments that should move as a different mode. Freight audit verifies every invoice against the tendered rate and disputes overcharges before they are paid. Finally, spend analytics expose the lanes, carriers, and accessorials quietly inflating your budget so you can renegotiate from data. Individually each lever is modest; run together and enforced daily, they compound into durable savings.

Yes, integration is a core part of the setup rather than an afterthought. The system connects to your ERP, WMS, and order-management platforms through EDI and modern APIs, so orders flow in and shipment status, costs, and proof of delivery flow back without anyone rekeying data. On the carrier side we map the standard EDI transactions, 204 for tender, 990 for acceptance, 214 for status, and 210 for invoice, alongside REST APIs and flat-file feeds for partners who prefer them. Because we run the platform, our team owns the mapping, testing, and ongoing maintenance of those connections. You are not staffing an integration project or troubleshooting broken feeds; you approve the data flow and we keep it running.

Far less time than a self-licensed deployment. Because the platform is already built, hosted, and running, standing up your program is a configuration and onboarding exercise rather than a software project. Most shippers go live in two to four weeks: we load your lanes, carriers, and contracted rates, connect the EDI and API feeds to your ERP, and configure your routing guides and approval rules. Simple networks move faster; complex ones with many integrations or unusual routing logic sit at the longer end. Compare that to the six-to-twelve months a typical enterprise TMS implementation consumes before it processes a single load, and the managed path is usually generating savings before a licensed system would have finished its kickoff phase.

We support the full set of standard freight EDI transactions plus modern API connectivity. On the carrier side that means the 204 load tender, the 990 tender response, the 214 shipment status and milestone updates, the 210 freight invoice, and the 997 functional acknowledgment. On the shipper side we integrate order, inventory, and shipment data with your ERP or order-management system through EDI 940 and 945 warehouse messages where relevant, REST APIs, or scheduled flat-file exchanges. The goal is a closed loop: an order becomes a tendered load, the load reports its status back automatically, and the settled invoice reconciles against the original rate. Because our team owns the integrations end to end, mapping and maintenance never land on your IT staff.

The analytics turn raw carrier invoices into decisions. Standard reporting includes cost per mile, cost per unit, and cost per lane, carrier scorecards with on-time pickup and delivery rates, tender acceptance and rejection trends, accessorial breakdowns, and budget-versus-actual freight spend. You can see which lanes are drifting above benchmark, which carriers are missing service commitments, and where accessorial charges are quietly compounding. Because our analysts run the platform, you also get interpretation, not just dashboards: a monthly review that flags the lanes worth rebidding, the carriers worth consolidating volume onto, and the routing rules worth adjusting. Finance gets numbers it can trust because every figure traces back to an audited, settled invoice.

It comes down to volume, internal capacity, and where you want your team's attention. Licensing your own system can make sense for very large shippers with the freight volume to justify a dedicated logistics-technology team, the appetite for a long implementation, and the desire to own the platform outright. For most mid-market shippers the math favors the managed model: no capital outlay, no multi-month project, no hiring analysts and integration specialists, and no risk of an expensive tool sitting underused because nobody had time to configure it well. The managed service also stays carrier-neutral, whereas some licensed platforms are owned by asset-based providers whose routing quietly favors their own trucks.

Completely. The routing guide is yours; we operate it, we do not override it. You decide which carriers are approved, how service level is weighted against cost, which lanes are contracted versus open to the spot market, and where approval checkpoints sit before a load tenders. The system then enforces those rules consistently on every shipment, which is actually more control than a manual process where individual dispatchers make one-off calls under time pressure. Because we are carrier-neutral, the least-cost compliant carrier in your guide wins each tender rather than whichever provider has a relationship with a sales rep. You can adjust the rules whenever your network, rates, or service priorities change, and the change takes effect on the next load.

A managed TMS is the layer that ties every domestic mode together instead of managing each in its own silo. The same rate shopping and routing logic evaluates whether a shipment should move as full truckload, consolidate into less-than-truckload, or ship as optimized parcel, then tenders it to the best carrier in that mode. Tracking, exception alerts, freight audit, and spend analytics run uniformly across all of them, so you get one reconciled view of cost and service rather than three disconnected reports. That cross-mode visibility is where a lot of savings hide, because the cheapest mode for a given shipment is frequently not the one it has always shipped on out of habit.

Pricing is built around running your freight program rather than renting you seats in a piece of technology. There is no license to buy, no implementation invoice, and no headcount to hire, so your cost is the managed service itself, sized to your volume and the scope of lanes and modes we operate. That is structurally different from a self-licensed system, where you pay the platform fee, the integration project, and the analysts to run it, and then hope the tool gets used enough to justify the outlay. Because our team executes the freight, the value is measured in the savings the program produces, disciplined rate shopping alone typically returns 5 to 10 percent on freight spend, not in features you may or may not adopt. We quantify the expected savings against the fee before you start.

Your data is yours. The lane list, contracted rates, carrier agreements, routing guides, and the full history of tenders, tracking, and settled invoices belong to you, and we return them in standard, portable formats if you ever move off the service. Because the routing logic is documented rather than locked in someone's head, the configuration is transferable, and the freight-spend history stays intact for benchmarking wherever it lands next. There is no proprietary data hostage situation and no punitive exit, because the model is a service you can leave, not a multi-year software contract you are stuck amortizing. In practice most shippers stay because the economics keep working, but the arrangement is deliberately built so that staying is a choice, not a switching-cost trap.

They solve different problems and are strongest together. A visibility dashboard tells you where your freight is, tracking milestones and flagging exceptions, but it does not decide how a load should move or what it should cost. A managed TMS is the execution layer underneath: it rate-shops carriers, applies your routing guide, tenders the load, audits the invoice against the tendered rate, and turns settled costs into analytics. Visibility without execution leaves your team watching problems it still has to act on by hand; execution without visibility leaves you blind between pickup and delivery. In the managed model both run in one workflow, so an exception on a load and the analyst acting on it happen in the same place, which is what keeps tender acceptance and on-time performance from quietly slipping.

The onboarding inputs are straightforward: your lane list, your carrier roster with contracted rate sheets and accessorial schedules, your current routing rules or service-level priorities, and connection details for your ERP or order-management system so we can map the EDI and API feeds. On the carrier side we need the trading-partner IDs to map the standard freight transactions, the 204 tender, 990 response, 214 status, and 210 invoice. Where you exchange flat files instead, we set up those transfers. We handle the mapping, testing, and maintenance of every connection, so your IT staff approves the data flow rather than building it. Most shippers assemble this package in days, which is why go-live typically lands in two to four weeks instead of the months a self-licensed deployment consumes before it moves a single load.

Both. The same managed program that rate-shops and tenders your domestic loads runs your international and cross-border lanes through one system, so ocean, air, and over-the-road moves report into a single view of cost and status instead of living in separate portals. On international freight the execution extends into entry and documentation accuracy through our licensed customs brokerage, so the freight record and the compliance file reconcile to the same numbers. Cross-border moves into Mexico and Canada carry their own routing, carrier, and paperwork requirements, and those rules live in the same routing guide your team controls. Running every mode and geography through one accountable team is where a lot of hidden savings surface, because the cheapest compliant option is chosen consistently rather than defaulting to whatever each region always used.