Brokerage Solutions

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Technology facilitates the manual brokerage process

With today's increasingly constrained transportation market, more and more companies are brokering out their loads to accommodate their supply chain needs. These companies are not only demanding that their brokerage partners provide timely quotes using current technologies but also that those partners provide seamless tracking and invoicing to complete the process.  Typically brokers approached this business manually with very few tools to help the agents as they attempted to determine how much to quote and how much to pay.  Since the broker is the tie between the shipper and the carrier, the brokerage operation must also approach the entire process from the shipper and carrier perspective utilizing new technologies. 

The MercuryGate TMS allows the broker to provide quotes to customers and get quotes from carriers efficiently and effectively.  As quotes are received, the system may automatically provide a quote back to the shipper via email, electronic communication, or real-time interaction.  If an agent needs to be involved, the agent can examine historical shipments or model the current shipment against benchmark rates to respond quickly to the shipper of the goods.   When trying to cover the load, the agent may send email quote requests to one or many carriers, post the load to a private bid board, or if needed post the load to a public load board.  Once the load is covered, clip levels may be established to ensure profitability levels are maintained or at least understood.   Finally both the carrier and customer invoices may be dealt with electronically ensuring proper billing and auditing of invoices. 

Figure 1: Shipper portal with Get Quote wizard and other functions

By establishing a state-of-the-art, Internet-based, transportation and logistics technology foundation, you can do away with the people-intensive, highly-manual, and inaccurate processes typical in the brokerage industry. The MercuryGate TMS is an information system dedicated to capturing and monitoring of all the activities and events related to the brokerage operation.  From this logistics “nervous system”, real-time information can flow to your customers and carriers as well as to you – giving you the ability to monitor and manage your own business thus allowing you to continually improve your customer service, performance, and profitability.
MercuryGate provides value by:

• Allowing you to manage more customers with your current resources
  • Viewing previous loads to see historical buy and sell information for a lane
  • Enabling carrier sourcing by lane to display to the agent the preferred carriers for the lane, equipment needs, and service.
  • Providing electronic communications to carrier for quotes
  • Allowing electronic communication to shippers of quotes
  • Reducing key strokes by reusing previous data or leveraging address books or item catalogs
• Enabling you to support systematically all business models
  • Supporting buy and sell rates
  • Enabling target rates
  • Displaying historical rates
  • Combining any of the above models
• Providing a tool to manage and measure your carriers, customers, and yourselves
• Simplifying and expediting the customer boarding process (bringing on new customers)

Most importantly, MercuryGate does all this while reducing your risk to implement our solution.  We guarantee to make the business equation close by focusing our costs on how you make money.  Furthermore, there is no need to pay for the solution until you are up and running live in production and are satisfied that the solution will meet your needs – that is how confident we are that you will be successful with our TMS solution!

Figure 2: MercuryGate provides many tools to agents/call takers such as this view of similar loads showing carrier, carrier charge, and what the customer paid.