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C.H. Robinson

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C.H. Robinson launched a new tool to help businesses navigate spot market costs, the company announced Sept. 20.

Market Rate IQ is intended to help companies compare their spot rates to a third-party benchmark, while also breaking down where they could save money, the company said.

“Market Rate IQ brings information together from a number of different places to really try to give shippers and our account teams the opportunity to understand what’s happening inside of the shipments,” Tim Gagnon, vice president of analytics and data science at C.H. Robinson, told Transport Topics. “To really evaluate what’s going on and make some decisions.”

Introducing Market Rate IQ: Our new technology that shows shippers which factors in their spot pricing they can control, how their rates compare to market, and where they can save. It’s an industry first in transparency — C.H. Robinson (@CHRobinson)

Gagnon said Market Rate IQ provides granular data that gives users a more complete overview of spot market data, and provides insight into trends as well as areas where users can control costs.

“Having access to granular information about the market, but then also the operational grain that this tool provides,” Gagnon said. “That’s really the power of the tool here — to be able to combine the variety of resources into one spot to make decisions, to look for ways to contain the spend as best as possible.”

DAT’s RateView is the primary benchmark that the tool uses to compare pricing. C.H. Robinson said it teamed up with the load board company as it viewed DAT’s spot rate service as an industry standard.

“Shippers don’t have to be at the mercy of these uncertain times,” Mike Weaver, vice president of sales at DAT, said in a statement. “The right technology and data can make a powerful difference. Market Rate IQ represents two industry leaders coming together to help all parties negotiate with confidence, transparency and the most trusted rate benchmarks in the industry.”

Gagnon added, “There are dozens of operational attributes around every load, and the power of this tool really comes from millions of loads. So a lot of data. And then the market information powered by DAT is also extremely granular. It’s daily, it’s at the lane level, so there’s a lot of information.”

(C.H. Robinson)

Market Rate IQ is offered alongside other market tools within C.H. Robinson’s Navisphere platform.

“The tool itself is updated in real time,” Gagnon said. “It is really the orchestration of many data sources. And it is delivered through business intelligence or analytics applications, and [is] built with the user in mind.”

Market Rate IQ identified $75 million in potential customer savings across $1.2 billion in spot freight spend during its testing period, C.H. Robinson said. During that time the company discovered lead time, uneven freight, weekend pickup, multiple stops and delivery geography were the top controllable reasons customers were paying more on the spot market.

“We built the interface to be very user-centric,” Gagnon said. “Really try to aggregate up into a dashboard format the total spend, the areas of opportunities to save and the performance versus benchmark. Beyond the top of the house dashboard, the ability to drill into detail.”

C.H. Robinson Worldwide ranks No. 1 on the Transport Topics Top 50 list of the largest logistics companies in North America.��

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