Logistics Technology News

Adoption of digital bills of lading has been stronger in Asia, but US traction is necessary to help container lines meet a 2030 commitment to fully move to electronic documents.

The digital solution will be available for US imports this week and is set to roll out globally in August.

OTR Solutions had alleged in a lawsuit that load board provider DAT violated a non-compete agreement by acquiring a rival factoring company.

OTR Capital argues DAT, the largest load board for truckload freight in North America, violated a non-compete clause when it acquired factoring company Outgo in May.

The lack of interoperability between a wide-ranging set of tracking hardware products presents an obstacle for customs authorities to overcome, a new report has found.

Demand from Cargado’s freight broker customers to add US-Canada carriers to its vetted network led the company to move to the northern border.

The change at the top of the freight-matching platform comes as the truckload sector enters the fourth year of a freight downturn that began in 2022.

Pallet is building tools to automate functions such as data entry, email and web portal integrations across ordering, quoting and tracking in the logistics industry.

The company’s deal for E2open shows it is betting it can thread the needle between keeping its customers happy while targeting the customers of those customers.

The widely used forwarding software platform has long been acquisitive, but its pending purchase of logistics and planning platform E2open represents a new foray into shipper-focused technology.

The purchase of Outgo, founded in 2022, is meant to help DAT gather more transactional data but also to make its freight marketplace more complete for carriers and brokers.

Technology providers are rolling out artificial intelligence tools to help augment transportation teams and service providers with limited resources.

In launching TruSygnal, Burns Logistics CEO Ed Burns wanted to provide a way to allow small carriers to create relationships with shippers that typically shy away from brokers.

Rapidly growing occurrences of cargo theft in the US have compelled two early-stage technology companies to use data around truckload movements to assist law enforcement.

The $12 million investment in Cargado will be used to expand the load board with other tools for freight brokers to tap into cross-border freight growth.

The partnership will see SMC3 provide less-than-truckload rating, booking and tracking data into Turvo’s transportation management system, which primarily serves US freight brokers and third-party logistics providers.

Firms sourcing from Vietnam, India or Mexico rely heavily on components, raw materials and equipment from China, which will remain an essential link in the production supply chain even if it’s no longer the only one.

Ongoing supply chain disruption and a significant increase in trading of container freight futures among speculative investors could accelerate the adoption of financial hedging tools among shippers and other physical industry players.

In a move to better utilize its leased pool of trailers, Uber Freight has partnered with software vendor Optimal Dynamics to bundle loads for drivers across 10 trailer pool locations.

Acquisitions continue in the domestic freight market, with Descartes buying 3GTMS to continue a decade-long spree of purchases.

While shippers might have expected ocean carriers to make application programming interfaces widely available by 2025, negative incentives have inhibited that progress.

The explosion of logistics software-as-a-service tools is leading shippers to build data foundations that reside outside of their internal systems.

The visibility market has bifurcated into standalone vendors too small to be captured by Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” report and larger vendors whose platforms extend far beyond what the report evaluates.

Digital forwarders that emerged over the past decade are coming of age in the era of AI, but not all will make it to the other end.

Acquisition activity in the truckload space continues, with price benchmarking vendor Greenscreens.ai the latest to sell.

Shipper, forwarder and customs broker associations want to see the members of the Digital Container Shipping Association accelerate efforts to create interoperable process standards.

Automation of the customs entry process, which software provider Magaya announced this week, is being enabled by advances in data extraction from emails and offline files.

project44 is the latest established software provider to release a suite of artificial intelligence agents amid a torrent of startups building tools for logistics providers and shippers.

A new report from software vendor Kaleris has found that terminal operators around the globe believe they are providing better visibility data than shippers say are they receiving.

Unstructured data, security concerns and value questions are holding back the progression of technology in the breakbulk industry.

Regulatory uncertainty around the allowance of digital trade documents is one factor that has slowed the adoption of electronic bills of lading in the shipping industry.

DSV CEO Jens Lund said the size of the Schenker acquisition meant it could take up to two years before the companies were fully integrated into the world’s largest forwarder.

GenLogs uses a network of highway sensors to help freight brokers manage freight fraud and also identify sales and capacity opportunities.

A startup founded and backed by ex-Flexport sales executives is aiming to help shippers manage the flood of outbound sales efforts they receive from logistics providers.

A handful of companies unveiled new products in the last week intended to enable decision-making based off the visibility data they provide.

The US is seeking to amend rules regarding so-called de minimis shipments, which have skyrocketed since the pandemic.

Shippers have long outsourced drayage to third parties, but farming out allocation decisions to managed transportation providers threads the needle between access to capacity and neutrality.

The acquisition is part of a surge in logistics M&A transactions aimed at simplifying access to systems and services for shippers and brokers.

More uptake of transactional pricing in the less-than-truckload market is a sign that some carriers are targeting smaller or more infrequent LTL shippers.

Shippers must weigh the merits of a single-source relationship on drayage through key ports over splitting volume among regional and national carriers, or even brokers.