Update: 4/15/22 - Added Recent Quotes Deep Dive

A capacity management system like Parade helps you build deeper carrier relationships leading to more carrier reuse, higher carrier rep productivity and higher gross margins per load. Our data shows that digital bookings (aka Book Nows) are the key to achieving this. Our data also shows that for most carriers, quoting is the first path to becoming a carrier that books digitally.

As a result, it is critical that you nurture your carriers who provide quotes and attempt digital bookings. Our Missed Opportunities dashboard helps you identify and diagnose where you are successfully digitally booking and quoting vs. where you need to improve.

Below we walk through the metrics and what to do with them.

Carriers who book digitally yield higher gross margins per load and enable your reps to handle more loads per day. Your goal should be to make 100% of Book Nows successful.

We provide a snapshot of how many successful and unsuccessful Book Nows you have done over the past 90 days (both a summary and weekly view). We also provide a detailed list of each unsuccessful load over the past 90 days.

When a Book Now is unsuccessful, it is for one of three reasons:

Abandoned - a carrier clicked the Book Now button and your carrier rep was informed via email but the carrier rep did not act within 30 minutes to confirm the load. This led to the Book Now being marked as abandoned.

TMS Conflict - a carrier attempted a Book Now but the load was booked in the TMS on a different carrier. This usually happens because 1) Book Nows are not yet fully automated back to the TMS and 2) the carrier rep did not check for a Book Now before assigning a load.

Both of these situations can be solved by:

1) Contacting Parade to see what options there are to fully automate the Book Now experience (i.e., carrier clicks Book Now, data flows directly to TMS and the ratecon is sent automatically via the TMS). Full automation eliminates these errors.

2) Teaching your carrier reps that they need to be more responsive to Book Nows. They need to understand that there is a 30 minute service level expectation or the Book Now will fail. They need to understand that they need to check for Book Nows before manually assigning loads. The benefit to them of doing this is that they will get more loads covered faster and it will make their jobs easier.

A third reason is TMS Rejected - a carrier successfully booked the load from Parade's perspective but it was rejected by the TMS. This usually happens when the status of a carrier gets out of sync between your TMS and Parade. For instance, if a carrier is marked as enabled in Parade but their status changes in the TMS. Please check the status of the load and the carrier in your TMS.

Quotes are important as the carriers who are quoting in Parade today are the ones who will be doing Book Nows tomorrow. It's important to make sure that you are consistently awarding freight to these carriers when they're the lowest price (there are always exceptions to this-but they should be the exception, not the norm).

We provide a summary and weekly snapshot of how many quotes you have received over the last 90 days, which of these converted (i.e., were the lowest price and the load was booked at that price with that carrier) plus the rate at which they are converting. We also provide which quotes were missed (i.e., the load was booked with a different carrier at a higher price than the quote) - and we calculate the gross margin you gave up (the total amount you overpaid vs. the lowest quote).

Note that the sum of your converted quotes and missed quotes is likely not the same as your total number of quotes: some loads may have multiple quotes and other times the quotes simply weren't competitive.

We provide a detailed list of every missed quote over the past 90 days plus a summary of your most-missed carriers. We recommend that carrier rep managers review this list with each rep to identify why quotes were missed (there may be good reasons for some) and that you contact your most frequently missed carriers so that you maintain a great relationship with them.

There is a second category of carrier who quotes frequently but never wins any freight. We call these your Most Uniquely Uncompetitive Quoters because they are bidding on your freight but you don't give them any loads.

These carriers are a mystery and we recommend contacting them. If you can convince them to give you better rates, they are well positioned to graduate to Book Nows because they have shown that they want to engage with you digitally.

This report is a list of all the quotes you received in the past 90 days, where they came from and whether the carrier won the load. Download it into Excel and you can answer questions like "where do my quotes come from?" and "do some channels convert better than others?"