C.H. Robinson says appointment scheduling tech saves 7.4 hours per load

Logistics service provider C.H. Robinson says its appointment scheduling technology is digitizing its freight shipping operations, enabling touchless appointments for truckload freight for 2,545 customers at 25,000 facilities.

In a nutshell, the technology replaces the approach of using phone calls and emails to schedule an appointment at the place a load needs to be picked up, then scheduling another appointment where the load needs to be delivered, the company said. “Achieving touchless appointments is a big step forward for automating supply chains,” Michael Castagnetto, C.H. Robinson’s President of North American Surface Transportation, said in a release. “It’s far more efficient for technology to find an appointment slot that’s open, that works for both the loading dock and the carrier, and gets the freight where it needs to be on time.” 

The Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based company says its platform automates that process and applies artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the optimal appointment – based on transit-time data from C.H. Robinson’s millions of shipments across 300,000 shipping lanes, facility data such as peak dwell time, and the most convenient time windows for carriers.

According to the company, its technology gets shippers’ freight on the road faster than using manual methods, shaving an average of 7.4 hours off the time required to connect a customer’s load to its carrier network. “The trucking industry has been hungry to digitize everything from load-matching to booking to real-time visibility while freight is in transit,” Arun Rajan, C.H. Robinson’s COO, said. “Giving people better digital tools to use is great progress; actually automating the complex processes of logistics is another frontier. That’s why automation has largely not yet reached appointment scheduling.”

Other trucking service providers working on digitizing the appointment scheduling process include the digital freight platform provider Uber Freight, which on Monday rolled out a pilot version of its new application programming interface (API) for freight scheduling, in collaboration with other carrier and transportation software providers in a group called the Scheduling Standards Consortium (SSC).