IL2000 Streamlines its Bid Process with SMC3’s Bid$ense Procurement Tool

SMC³ Integrated Logistics 2000 (IL2000), Case Study

The Situation: A need to streamline and manage the bid process

With the rise in available data, the need to understand, utilize and share it becomes increasingly important.

Integrated Logistics 2000 (IL2000), a third-party logistics provider for shippers and carriers, needed a procurement tool to help manage large sets of data, create bid events, optimize workflows and enable responsive communications.

With many bid procurement tools on the market, IL2000 began their search for the one that could help them achieve their goals at scale.

To help with the selection process, the company started by defining what kind of information and output they would like to get out of their bid tool.

They narrowed their search to a few crucial business outcomes their chosen bid tool would have to provide:

• The ability to identify bidding challenges and their impact on business
• Targeted negotiations
• Faster feedback to clients and carriers
• Shorter response times
• An easy way to follow up on accepted RFPs and save time

SMC³ Solution - Bid$ense®

IL2000 selected SMC³ Bid$ense®, a cloud-based solution for over-the-road freight transportation sourcing and pricing negotiation.

In one RFP example, IL2000 used Bid$ense to run a smarter bid procurement event at a scope of 10,000 shipments from 51 different origins and across 3,300 unique lanes.

“It was not a small data set,” said Dave Kiesling, former VP of Capacity and Logistics Engineering at IL2000, now Vice President, Transportation Management Vice President, Transportation Management at Kenco Group.

“A bid tool does not replace calling and making sure a carrier has opened an RFP. With Bid$ense, We can see whether they have accepted, but we can still then follow up and say, ‘Do you have any questions?’ Bid$ense prompts you and says, ‘This is when you should be doing that follow-up.”

The company sent 41 unique bid invitations to carriers through Bid$ense - all as one push email from the tool, as opposed to 41 emails to be individually sent, corralled, and followed up on.

The Results: Saving time and money through optimized RFP events

SMC³ Bid$ense has become a valuable tool for IL2000 by simplifying and streamlining the procurement event process.

IL2000 also saw benefit in working with SMC³ and their team of transportation experts to optimize RFP events saving them time and money.

In the example above, the results immediately distinguished Bid$ense as the bid solution of choice for IL2000, providing value across key areas:

• Instant visibility into bid responses (33 out of 41 carriers accepted the RFP; 31 responded)
• Showed IL2000 the impact of different respondent criteria, down to the lane level
• Enabled timely follow-up with carriers that accepted the RFP, including prompts from Bid$ense about when to follow up with which carriers
• Allowed for inclusion or exclusion of specific carriers

Kiesling said that Bid$ense was valuable to the entire discipline of bid administration:

“You’re not chasing carriers left and right. You know what carriers have responded and what carriers haven’t responded. You’re able to provide consistent and complete communication with your supply base each and every time.”

Bid$ense provided holistic pricing, claims ratios, on-time performance data, transit times, and more in the bidding analysis.

It allowed for timely, consistent, and complete communications to their carrier audience. It also provided a way to run scenario analysis and targeted negotiations to get the best pricing available.

Bid$ense provides insights and intelligent information instantly to help streamline the procurement process, and improve carrier relationships and action prompts needed for successful bid management.

Bid$ense allowed IL2000 to manage all bid responses through a single integrated dashboard, giving them the ability to process bids faster, manage the increasing scope of bids, and get more out of each procurement event.

“As soon as a carrier responds, you know what the result is. There’s no data manipulation. There’s no, ‘Let me run it through the spreadsheet.’ You can see it: Red is bad, and black is good.” - Dave Kiesling

SMC³ Bid$ense Benefits

• Saved time and budget
• Improved carrier relations
• Delivered complete visibility across the bid process
• Automated workflows and streamlined decision-making
• Drove timely and consistently Improved carrier relations communications