News / Uber Freight courts shippers with procurement and financial management tools

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Uber Freight is trying to hook shippers with functionality it claims covers complex processes.

It has released a bundle of new tools that offer shippers full management of the financial cycle of a shipment as well as scenario analysis capability that can streamline the freight procurement process across a slew of truckers. This is flanked by AI agents to automate a number of tasks.

Uber Freight’s updated TMS Financials platform lets users track and manage the full payment cycle and offers them a single view of their accounts receivable and accounts payable for a clearer picture. On top of giving better control of freight spend, the company claims that this can reduce dispute resolution times significantly.

“We had one customer who told us they reduced the number of invoices stuck in a hold queue from 80% to 20%,” said Steve Barber, VP of product.

“LTL carriers have become particularly aggressive in their assessorial management process,” he noted. “While their pricing overall hasn’t changed, they’re doing a much better job of capturing weight discrepancies, density discrepancies, special equipment requirements for special handling, packaging problems, and all of that will show up typically on the invoice.”

More ambitious than the financial cycle management element is the scenario analysis functionality, which promises shippers a fast track to procurement analysis to replace time-consuming collection of data and lengthy consideration of how to split traffic among multiple truckers for optimum results. This enables users to view likely outcomes in their evaluation of multiple bid award strategies on Uber Freight Exchange, the company’s contract freight procurement platform. They can choose different combinations of their carrier mix to quantify projected savings, service improvements and carrier performance.

Currently procurement scenario analysis happens in two broad forms, according to Mr Barber. One is based on e-mails with spreadsheets asking truckers for pricing, which requires a lot of time and effort. The second approach utilises modules produced by large procurement companies. These are expensive and typically require a consultant or an analyst to run them, so they are usually wielded for major bids, which tend to happen on an annual basis.

“Shippers told us they wanted something in the middle,” he said.

Uber Freight engaged with ten customers to discuss the requirements of such a tool, which led to the development of the scenario analysis module. This engagement with customers in the development of new tools means that at the launch the company knows there will be uptake for them, Mr Barber remarked.

While these new offerings leverage AI, Uber Freight has also stepped up its use of the technology through AI agents for specific tasks like automatically generated e-mails or voice agents calling for appointment schedules. Those agents are trained to monitor the system for exceptions and take action when they detect them.

According to Uber Freight, these systems are already automating thousands of scheduling tasks daily, cutting scheduling times by up to 38% and reducing costly re-schedules by a third.

Customer adoption of Uber Freight’s technology varies. Some customers use TMS Financials to manage their payables and about 25% of Uber’s customer base uses the entire TMS as a stand-alone technology offering. Others have picked individual tools, Mr Barber said. “We want to give them that optionality to pick and choose. We have a modular approach with all of our technology.”

Still, the overarching vision is of a closer engagement with customers to address more of their processes. Mr Barberdescribed the latest set of updates as a move toward the vision of “a unified logistics platform for intelligence, automation and humans”. For shippers this should translate into faster decisions, greater visibility and more resilient networks, he added.