Automate Carrier Selection for Your Logistics Firm

Many small logistics firms use their TMS, like MercuryGate or AscendTMS, for rating. These platforms work well for standard freight on major lanes but often lack connections to smaller, regional LTL carriers that offer better rates or service in specific areas. The TMS becomes a system of record, but the actual quoting work happens outside of it.

Consider a 10-person brokerage quoting a spot LTL shipment. The TMS returns no options. A broker then spends the next 30 minutes logging into three separate carrier web portals, re-typing the exact same shipment details each time. They copy-paste the results into a spreadsheet, add their margin, and email the best option to the customer. This manual process is slow and prone to data entry errors that cause expensive re-bills later.

Even dedicated rating tools like DAT RateView provide market averages, not real-time, bookable quotes. They are a reference point, not a transactional tool. The core problem is that off-the-shelf software is built for the 80% of common carriers and cannot adapt to the unique carrier mix that gives a small firm its competitive edge. Their data models are fixed, preventing you from adding the specific business logic your operation runs on.

The first step is a carrier audit. We would map your top 10-15 carriers and document how each provides rate information. Some have modern APIs, some email PDF or Excel rate sheets, and others require logging into a web portal. This audit produces a concrete integration plan and a firm timeline for the build.

The technical approach would use a FastAPI service as the central rating engine. For carriers with APIs, Python's `httpx` library handles parallel, asynchronous calls efficiently. For emailed rate sheets, a Claude API pipeline would parse the documents and extract structured data into a Supabase database. We've used this same pattern to process unstructured financial documents. A headless browser library like Playwright would handle carriers that only have a web portal. The entire system can process 10 carriers in under 15 seconds.

The delivered system is a simple API that your team can access from a web form or even a Google Sheet. Your brokers enter shipment details once to see a sorted list of all available carrier options. The service runs on AWS Lambda, keeping hosting costs under $50/month. The build takes approximately 4-6 weeks from discovery to handoff.