The Long Game: Strategic Tech Investments for Enduring Freight Success
The current trade situation, supply chain disruption and hints of rising rates and lower capacity are all keeping shippers, brokers, and carriers up at night in 2025. For help, many of them are turning to cloud-based transportation management systems (TMS) that offer functionalities like real-time market data integration, rate forecasting, capacity planning tools and more.
In this expert Q&A, Charles Craigmile, President and CEO at Revenova, discusses the current freight market realities and how companies are using TMS to smooth out some of the fluctuations, address immediate challenges and plan for the future.
Q: In light of the current trade situation and uncertainties, what role does software play in helping companies address the issues and keep their supply chains running smoothly?
A: The role of TMS and technology is significant, but it’s important to note that investment in technology is not a tactical thing—it’s a strategic thing. In other words, you should be continually investing in technology whether your freight volume goes up 30% or if it goes down 5% (like it is for many right now).
Q: Do companies tend to take the “tactical” approach to tech adoption?
A: They do, unfortunately, when they should look at their tech investments as a “permanent” decision that should be made in any economic environment—and not just when things get challenging and an immediate need arises.
Q: How does Revenova TMS help its customers operate more resiliently and securely in all types of freight environments
A: Our platform is built entirely on the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform. That means we’re continually reinvesting in and leveraging the investment Salesforce makes in its platform. The company is especially focused on security, which is a growing concern in the supply chain space. Take the Estes Express Lines hack from 2023, for example, where criminals stole the personal information of 20,000 of the company’s customers. Estes was offline for nearly 30 days, which was devastating for the company and for its customers, but also totally preventable.
Q: What are some of the Salesforce security strategies that Revenova leverages and builds upon?
A: It’s all about reliability and uptime, both of which are driven by Salesforce’s investments in security and artificial intelligence (AI). We repurpose those functions for transportation and/or develop our own, based on the specific instance. We help customers become more efficient and more productive, both of which help them stay nimble in this sideways freight environment.
Q: How does Revenova help companies optimize their transportation strategies?
A: With so much market volatility and fluctuating load pricing, companies need real-time, actionable data that helps them make good decisions. Our LaneIQ product is a proprietary lane-by-lane analysis tool integrated within our TMS. It provides historical customer and carrier quotes for specific freight lanes and leverages a network consortium database to deliver real-time market conditions and lane history, aiding in informed pricing and negotiation decisions.
By aggregating and anonymizing user load data, LaneIQ offers competitive spot rate insights, empowering companies to optimize their operations and profitability.
Q: What makes LaneIQ different from other aggregation tools on the market today?
A: Load boards like DAT or Truckstop can show you what the market was 30 days ago or seven days ago, but none of that information is available in real-time. If you want to know the price of Microsoft stock, you don’t have to look at seven days of past history, you can look at it right now and see what the price is. That’s what we’re offering up with LaneIQ.
For brokers and carriers, our TMS also lets you interrogate your own data with questions like: What was I moving on this lane last year at this time? Where are the trucks located? What destination(s) was I shipping loads to? And, are there any available loads out there for backhaul opportunities? This is just some of the basic blocking-and-tackling data that freight brokers and carriers can use to ensure continually movement in their networks, which is what the trucking companies want and expect from a robust, modern, cloud-based TMS.
Source: Charles + this article
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