Scheduling Standards Consortium publishes API Standard for TMS

In 2022, a group of logistics companies got together to address the lack of application programming interface standards among freight providers. Convoy, Uber Freight and J.B. Hunt formed the Scheduling Standards Consortium (SSC). The focus: to establish industry standards geared towards “simplifying scheduling, improving automation for businesses, and generating industry-wide efficiencies.”

A year later, that group has grown and, on Monday at the CSCMP Edge 2023 conference in Orlando, members of the group’s leadership announced the publication if its Technical Standard for developing APIs for transportation management systems.

The standard is available on the open-source community GitHub and being made available to any entity within the freight and supply chain communities that wish to participate.

“It allows companies to make scheduling decisions,” explained Dan Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Convoy.

Lewis went on to note that more than 100 million hours a year are spent on booking appointments, leading to added costs for each shipment. “This will be a massive change to allow us to schedule quickly,” he said.

Eliminating friction

According to SSC, scheduling systems and interface fragmentation are significant points of friction amongst carriers, brokers, and shippers. The new Technical Standard took eight months to develop and included plenty of collaboration among SSC’s founding members and the many other companies that have joined since. The group said it will break down the “barriers that have long hindered efficient data sharing among shippers, carriers, and brokers.”

Greg Brady, founder and executive chairman of One Network Enterprises, said the collaboration among technology providers to adopt the standard will have a ripple effect throughout the supply chain.

“The opportunity here, and I think the real story, is [it is] much bigger for the shippers,” he said.

Brady said that One Network has run an older version of the standard, albeit in a proprietary way for several years.

“We have proven [this approach] works, and we will be rolling [our version] into this,” he said.

Smarter decisions, fewer wasted miles

The SSC’s API-based approach will allow companies to access the latest data and make smart decisions to increase efficiency, reduce empty miles and waste, lower costs, and improve service outcomes. As each company aligns with these standards, the industry can better orchestrate freight needs with data-informed systems, the group said.

Opening up the standard to anyone will foster better cooperation among all the parties in the supply chain, the group noted. Brady said retailers could see a 25% reduction in inventory cost through the standards due to what he said was a “three-to-four-day” lead time cycle for collecting and approving pickup and drop-off times and carrier and facilities coordination.

It will have a “dramatic impact,” he said, on utilization of freight, the ability to move product, and the opportunity to improve inventory efficiency. More than 14,000 companies are eligible to participate once the API is made available.

More than 800 companies have reached out to or joined the SSC, indicating the level of interest, the group said.

SSC is looking to bring together industry stakeholders including brokers, 3PLs, TMS and WMS vendors, to help streamline the freight process.

SSC member companies include Convoy, J.B. Hunt, Uber Freight, Arrive Logistics, Blue Yonder, Coyote Logistics, E2Open, Echo, One Network Enterprises and Oracle. On Monday, the organization announced that DHL Supply Chain, Lineage Logistics, Mastery Logistics Systems, Transportation Insight and Nolan Transportation, and Ryder System have also joined the group.

SSC also announced a new badging system, offering both innovator and early adopter badges to identify companies and their involvement and use of the SSC API standard.