newsworthy

THE BATTLE BETWEEN UPSTART PROJECT44 AND entrenched king SMC3 for the data-interchange hearts, minds, and budgets of shippers, third-party logistics service providers (3PLs), and less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers is heating up.

Chicago-based project44 has unveiled a free application programing interface (API) module that allows carriers to update their transit-time information as often as they want. The module is a clear broadside against SMC3’s vaunted “CarrierConnect XL” API product, which has dominated the market for LTL carrier information for years, and for which shippers and 3PLs pay a hefty price, in some cases as much as $35,000 annually. APIs function as engines that blast critical carrier data into the shipper and 3PL transportation management system (TMS), warehouse management system (WMS), and warehouse control system (WCS) platforms that have become increasingly critical in linking supply chains with accurate, real-time data.

More than 300 carriers feed SMC3’s CarrierConnect tool with up-to-date information on transit changes, according to the Peachtree City, Ga.-based organization. SMC3 handles thousands of transit changes each month, making the refreshed data available to shippers and

3PLs “based on the effective dates requested by the providers,” said Danny Slaton, the group’s chief innovation and strategy officer, in a statement e-mailed to DC VELOCITY.

Slaton declined to comment on project44 or its offerings.
“There are multiple technology players in the point-of-
service and transit-time business,” Slaton said in the state-
ment. “As the industry’s neutral party with extensive LTL
expertise and experience, the industry trusts us to provide
a reliable, secure service.”
However, C. Thomas Barnes, a veteran transport exec-
utive who became project44’s president late last year,
said that carrier transit-time information entered into
CarrierConnect is updated only twice a month. Carriers are
locked out of the system if they want to upload data more
frequently than that, while shippers and 3PLs don’t have
immediate visibility into transit-time changes made by car-
riers in response to bad weather, a labor disruption, or net-
work modifications due to shifts in demand flows, he said.
SMC executives vigorously dispute Barnes’ contention.
Project44 can afford to give away the module because
it has already built out the necessary infrastructure and it
costs little to maintain it, Barnes said. All project44 would
do is redirect existing carrier information into its infra-
structure, Barnes said. “We’re pulling
LTL carriers into our pipes,” he said.
Barnes said he expects most carriers using
the tool to update transit-time changes
on a weekly basis.

ROOM FOR ONE MORE?

Publicly and privately, both sides have danced around the sensitive issue of competition. Yet project44 executives have not hidden their views that opportunities exist for an alternative technology provider in the LTL space. Project44, cofounded by Jett McCandless, who at 37 is one of the “young Turks” of trucking IT, has made it clear that an industry never known for being a first mover on technology needs to move faster and think more progressively, especially as digital tools proliferate with the potential for making LTL more efficient and responsive to changing market conditions than ever before.

SMC3, which for about 60 years functioned as a rate bureau specializing in collective ratemaking, until motor carrier deregulation in 1980 spelled the beginning of the end of the decades-long practice, successfully reinvented itself in the mid-1990s as a data provider, leveraging the vast trove of carrier information at its disposal. The CarrierConnect tool is, by several accounts, a vastly profitable product for the company.