DHL Supply Chain and Emerge announce spot market-focused partnership

Earlier this month, DHL Supply Chain, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL Group, said it has established a partnership with Emerge, a provider of its proprietary Digital Freight Marketplace (DFM) and TMS focused on accelerating productivity and increasing visibility for supply chain stakeholders and freight procurement.

Through this partnership, DHL is integrating Emerge’s Spot Marketplace capabilities into the DHL LLP Control Tower and TMS offerings, with a focus on providing timely and market competitive coverage for spot market freight.

DHL officials said that this partnership helps to serve as another spot market capacity offerings for DHL Supply Chain, increasing its network of carriers its shipper customers can leverage, with a focus on cost savings related to the spot market. And they described the Emerge Freight Procurement Platform as an agile, scalable platform purpose-built to efficiently find better capacity and streamline freight management and that this partnership with Emerge is part of the company’s Accelerated Digitalization strategy and also highlights its investment in digitalizing the supply chain to optimize visibility, resiliency, efficiency and performance.

“We constantly monitor emerging technologies and have a rigorous technology selection process combined with a proven approach to technology implementation and integration. As part of this process, we vetted a number of digital freight marketplace platforms and piloted each with a select group of customers,” said Jim Monkmeyer, president, transportation, DHL Supply Chain North America, in a statement. “The Emerge offering was the most robust. Most importantly, the company is aligned with our transportation sourcing and procurement philosophy of focusing on targeted dynamic sourcing events. This made them an obvious choice to help us provide the capacity our customers need to continue to meet demand and overcome today’s transportation challenges.”

As for what drove the need for this partnership, a DHL spokesman told LM that throughout COVID-19 pandemic, the DHL LLP team has been working on a spot market offering as many customers were having difficulties keeping previously procured and contracted carriers to move their freight with an increase in spot freight requirements.

“DHL and Emerge did not have a previous relationship,” the spokesman said. “DHL evaluated multiple Digital freight platforms and marketplaces and quickly identified Emerge as a potential partner due to: proven management and development team at Emerge; robust digital freight marketplace platform; aligned philosophy on transportation sourcing & procurement; and a move from static annual network bid approach to targeted, dynamic sourcing events.”

When asked what the main benefits of this integration with Emerge are for DHL Supply Chain's shipper customers, the spokesman pointed to how it ensures efficient, timely coverage at market competitive rates for freight that has to move via spot market.

“We are excited to work with DHL Supply Chain to enable its customers to easily source the best partners and real-time market rates for their freight procurement needs. Together we are reinventing freight procurement,” said Jake Papa, senior vice president of Enterprise at Emerge, in a statement.