GlobalTranz introduces a new digital freight matching offering, GTZamp

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GlobalTranz, a full-service 3PL focused on freight brokerage and technology, announced today it has rolled out a new digital freight matching (DFM) offering, entitled GTZamp (Automated Movement Planning) for enterprise shipper customers that meshes the speed and ease of DFM with enhanced, multi-movement planning capabilities.

GlobalTranz officials said that GTZamp is comprised of various predictive analytics techniques that provide what it called industrial strength DFM that can be executed at scale, including:

• Load Affinity analysis that identifies shipments that are well-suited to be combined into a multi-movement route;
• Carrier Match functionality that algorithmically matches loads with the best carriers based on a host of factors, including volume covered, on-time performance, cost, bounce and roll percentages, and seasonality;
• Cost Prediction Model that predicts lane level costs based on a wide variety of features, including historical costs and current market conditions, in order to ensure that GlobalTranz maximizes savings for customers by securing the lowest possible rate; and
• Load To Truck Forecasting, a predictive analytics tool that leverages leading indicators to predict capacity availability in order to maximize service while minimizing cost

In an interview, GlobalTranz Chief Technology Officer Greg Carter said that GTZamp has been in the works for about a year, with this release being the formalization of various things it has been using to do like cost prediction, truck to load ratio calculations, carrier matching, load affinity, and other things it had automated and used to augment operations in its brokerages.

“We get closer and closer to having more automation and more digital freight matching with a much broader set of data than simply screen scraping, FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration), or some other public site,” he said. “We have 13 years worth of data…and that dataset continues to grow, both through acquisitions as well as organic activities. Having acquired eight brokerages over the last two years, we have gotten to incorporate not just the learning that we have but also the cumulative learning of a whole bunch of other people and systems. We spent the last year refining the data model, and we invested heavily in data science to improve our algorithms and now have the first version of an extremely sophisticated digital freight matching offering that is built on top of one of the larger datasets you are going to find in the TMS market or in the 3PL market.”

Also included in GTZamp is a business rules engine to take a lot of the tacit knowledge of the GlobalTranz operations staff and use it to drive automation, explained Carter. This, in a sense, he said, combines the best of both worlds, with a world class, highly ranked 3PL with great operations and carrier people, and then taking that knowledge and encoding it into the GlobalTranz dataset and offering it to its carrier partners and shipper customers.

“The whole idea of it is we want to keep a lot of customers in our network by matching loads way in advance,” said Carter. “This keeps carriers happy, because they get guaranteed loads and are not going to deadhead. We want to match three or four loads out into the future based on our predictive model. And that makes our shippers really happy because they’ve got guaranteed capacity. If we can get a carrier five loads in advance, we can be pretty aggressive on how we drive pricing.”  

Carter noted that GTZamp is can flex up or down, depending on the size of the shipper. And he said whether a shipper is moving 500 pallets a week or two, it can guarantee them a carrier with the best rate in the market, keep those carriers happy and keep using them.

For an enterprise shipper customer, he noted additional services are offered around GTZamp and its analytics platform, in which GlobalTranz’s own historical data and external data are put into its model, as well as the customer’s own data, too.

“As an example, a manufacturing customer in the Midwest, we can integrate with Exacta and SAP and now have visibility into data about their budget, their spend-to-budget, and production planning and use that to optimize their network for them,” he said. “It is another data point that this flexible machine can take in and allow us to do an even better prediction and better matching for that shipper.”

When asked about what some of the competitive advantages of GTZamp are in a very crowded and active DFM market, Carter said that it meshes “the best of both worlds,” in that it is providing world-class DFM with the world-class operations and logistics for a 3PL.