How a 3PL Ran Smarter, High-Quality Bid Events with SMC3’s Transportation Procurement Solution

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 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.