Transportation Insight (TI) & Nolan Transportation Group (NTG) offers managed transportation, outsourced logistics, freight audit and payment, among other contractual services. The company prides itself on offering customers a single point of access to its mode-agnostic network and services via its Beon Digital Logistics Platform. Nevertheless, behind the scenes, data-management systems were “very fragmented,” according to senior vice president of IT Loren Kaplan. 

Kaplan explains that TI & NTG had made multiple acquisitions of late. “And they all come with their own pieces of technology. We wanted a single platform that was integrated,” he says. Most importantly, TI & NTG’s less-than-truckload (LTL) customers rely heavily on electronic data interchange for data-sharing, but others seek different types of data input, such as application programming interfaces (APIs). Also, having to connect to multiple systems caused a lot of headaches for customers.

“We wanted a vendor that would give us the platform that we needed, and that could take us to where we wanted to be with an API platform,” says Kaplan, who worked at UPS as director of information systems before joining TI & NTG. “Our customers were starting to go more into the API space, and some wanted a hybrid solution. That’s one of the key things that drove us. We wanted to integrate once with customers. As a customer evolves, we wanted to be able to maintain these single integrations.”

Untangling the mess in-house was not an option. “Very costly,” Kaplan says. “We’d rather spend our money on things within our niche value.”

When TI & NTG went looking for help, it found there weren’t many vendors that offered a platform blending both API and traditional EDI. “We did an RFP [request for proposals] and looked at multiple providers,” says Kaplan. The winner was B2B communications specialist Cleo.

“Cleo didn’t really stick out to me initially, although I had used them at UPS,” Kaplan says. His colleague, Arjun Mullaguru, senior director of B2B Integration at TI & NTG, had experience with Cleo in his former job as integration architect at Carters Inc. Together they determined that Cleo was the best choice because it specializes in the brokerage and logistics space, Kaplan says. The companies started working together in March 2021.

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The team at Cleo helped TI & NTG take a strategic and tactical look at how they onboarded customers, in order to make it easier. “They made it right-out-of-the-box, very easy to connect,” Kaplan says, adding that staff training was minimal. “They caught on very easily because it’s a very simple process.”

The next step was populating the integrated platform with data. “We took this opportunity to, for example, get load tenders into our TMS [transportation management system],” Kaplan says. “We built a very robust integration template using Cleo. We got a very repeatable process for onboarding.”

Kaplan says TI & NTG did a lot of up-front work to review all of the company’s existing integrations, “to make sure we weren’t bringing all our junk over, otherwise integration would have been a nightmare, and we would never have finished. We’re still not finished, but it’s going well.”

Kaplan says the company had to make some concessions when it came to simplifying data transfers. “On the TI & NTG side of the house, if you look at trading partnership, it’s not just TI & NTG and the carrier, it’s the customer and the carrier. So, looking at the maps of that type of trading relationship, we had to break those down and find solutions that [reflected] customer-carrier specific rules. In this world, you can’t really get away from that, but Cleo gave us a way to simplify those maps.”

“Cleo’s been really great to work with,” adds Kaplan. “We could have done this on multiple other platforms. Because they really focus on this industry, they were able to share with us what they thought we should be doing. We feel like we’ve got a good partner rather than just a vendor. They brought expertise to the table and helped us simplify our world.”

Offering specialization in transportation and logistics is what made Cleo a good fit for TI & NTG, says Stuart Smith, Cleo’s vice president of key accounts. But another advantage is that Cleo was able to offer real-time advice based on what it observed at other companies in the same business.

“Customers want to hear what’s going on in the industry, and the insights we’ve garnered at other places,” says Smith. “We can take customers with really old systems, and make it so they can use all these new shiny things, and give them the full breadth of integration. We bring a lot of that from other customers’ practices.”

Concrete results for TI & NTG include clearing a backlog of 450 trading partners waiting to be integrated into TI & NTG’s data universe. Some carriers had been on hold for more than a year. “Using the integration console, the backlog with the B2B team came in last week,” Kaplan says. 

In the end, the savings are significant. “Every EDI transaction is a dollar,” Kaplan says. “If we don’t use an electronic invoice, it’s going to be a piece of paper that needs to be hand-keyed, and that’s an operational cost to us. And then, in audit, it might have to be touched again — all because it didn’t come in electronically.”

Kaplan says being able to bring everything in electronically to a single data ecosystem means TI & NTG can integrate customers much more quickly, and can trust the data more than when it’s being keyed in manually. “I used to have to report weekly [about this] to my CEO,” says Kaplan. “Now I don’t have to!”

Smoothing communication with carriers has been a big plus, Kaplan says. “When we have to do a rate quote, you’re sending it out to a bunch of brokers. If you don’t send that out ASAP, you’re going to be dropped from the list. We’re getting into that space a bit better now with Cleo. Overall, there’s been a lot of great wins.”