Automated Scheduling: How Transfix Leverages Tech to Save 2 Hours Daily

Appointments scheduling is one of the most inefficient and painful processes in the FTL industry for shippers, carriers, and facility staff. Even for routine shipments, scheduling and confirming appointments commonly requires an enormous amount of back-and-forth emails and phone calls. For shippers, this inefficiency results in wasted time for transportation coordinators and the potential for loads to get pushed out from their intended delivery date. 

But it doesn’t have to be painful. At Transfix, we leverage technology to solve this problem and schedule appointments on behalf of all shippers at no additional cost. Learn how Smart Appointments saves time and reduces costs.

Scheduling Appointments One-by-One is an Unnecessary, Time-Consuming Process

Many shippers and traditional brokers schedule appointments on an individual basis, meaning that if Shipper A needs an appointment at Receiver B at 2pm on Monday, a call, email, or TMS schedule request is made to schedule that specific appointment. However, as a shipper needs to schedule hundreds appointments at different facilities, with at least two calls per shipment and potentially more if additional coordination between carriers and vendors is required, valuable time is wasted for all parties. 

Smart Appointments Does the Work for You

Smart Appointments is an internal tool leveraged by the Transfix team to schedule appointments for our shippers. It automatically aggregates all email appointment times needed across our entire network. Our technology then optimally groups the requests, communicates the required times to the facilities via email, and enables the facility staff to easily confirm the appointments with just one-click. If a facility does not confirm within a set timeframe, our team is automatically alerted. We estimate this technology saves two hours per day. 

Innovative Custom Solutions Provide Supply Chain Advantage

We recently partnered with another shipper to improve the scheduling process even more through a custom solution. Transfix leveraged its data to understand how appointment times map to cost and performance for this customer and then enhanced our Smart Appointments functionality to automatically request appointments based on the “ideal” time, resulting in lower costs for the shipper on their spot loads. 

Our scheduling technology, along with our sophisticated carrier matching algorithm and tracking capabilities, enable us to move touchless loads for select shippers with no active human intervention, all while maintaining 98% OTD performance.  By deploying technology strategically, Transfix is able move more loads with fewer people, lowering overall costs. The use of automation also gives our team more time to focus on proactively exceptions for the shipper if they occur and answering any customer questions. 

If you’re looking to optimize your freight operations, without sacrificing cost or performance, contact our team.