Transportation software vendor McLeod Software Corp. has added a digital freight matching (DFM) link to its transportation management system (TMS) software platform, saying the move allows McLeod customers to integrate third party providers of available freight and capacity matching solutions into their brokerage operations.
The newly published API web service for digital freight matching in PowerBroker TMS gives companies with freight and capacity matching services or products the ability to write and test their own integration solutions for PowerBroker, Birmingham, Ala.-based McLeod said today.
McLeod’s PowerBroker already supports direct integration with several DFM products in the marketplace, but the the new DFM web service API provides a connection from the third party DFM solution directly to the McLeod PowerBroker application. That gives vendors the ability to receive notifications on newly added or updated available shipments, to validate the qualification status of a given carrier based on PowerBroker’s business rules, to send capacity information on available equipment in a given area, to “cover” the load with a qualified carrier that will trigger an automated carrier rate confirmation, and to send a counteroffer on behalf of a qualified carrier for an available load, McLeod said.
“The release of this service achieves two primary goals,” Robert Brothers, McLeod’s vice president of product development, said in a release. “The first is to provide the greatest flexibility for our PowerBroker customers to choose the 3rd party freight matching solutions that help their business be more efficient in locating and transacting with capacity matching solutions. Secondly, we designed this to give control of security and shared data elements to our customers, the PowerBroker system user. Sometimes the external service interfaces available in the market do not allow a brokerage company to know or limit the amount of information that is shared outside their system. The McLeod DFM API changes that model, because the service is configurable with respect to the data that is retrieved by the external system supplier or service vendor.”
