COVID19 has been a tailwind for changes in the way that we get work done.

This is particularly true in industries that are often referred to as traditional or legacy industries. These industries are populated by a large number of Digital Immigrant businesses, businesses that pre-date the widespread adoption of digital technologies and business models.

The pandemic has pushed people in such industries and businesses to reconsider how they accomplish their work and satisfy their customers. Supply chain logistics and transportation is no exception. To remain in business, supply chain intermediaries have been forced to adjust their thinking and adopt software innovations that enable them to accomplish their work more effectively at an unprecedented pace.

As we have all adjusted to the pandemic, pricing has come to the forefront as an issue that is bedeviling supply chain intermediaries and their customers. This is particularly true as supply chains in every industry have experienced disruptions, and had to adjust to a new operating reality.

For example: On January 20, Transport Topics published Freight Costs Expected to Remain High in 2022; On February 9, Supply Chain Dive published Food suppliers wade into logistics as trucking rates soar; On February 16, Bloomberg published U.S. Freight Cost Blowout May Mean Little Inflation Relief Soon; On February 17, Truckinginfo published Fuel Prices, Tight Capacity Push Spot Rates Higher; On February 18, FreightWaves published Freight rate hikes over past 2 years unprecedented, economist says, and; On February 18, FleetOwner published While January spot truckload volumes dipped, rates hit new highs.

No single organization in an industry as large as the $800 Billion plus US trucking industry can single-handedly stop the macro forces that cause spot rate uncertainty and volatility. However, the pandemic has shown us that one way for organizations in any industry to fall behind their peers is to continue relying on antiquated approaches to getting work done.

This is especially true for price discovery, pricing, and revenue optimization.

Supply chain intermediaries grapple with the problem of bad, nonexistent, or inadequate data daily. While he is not focused specifically on supply chain logistics, Tom Redman, President of Data Quality Solutions helps outline the scale of the problem in this article that was ran by the Harvard Business Review on September 22, 2016, Bad Data Costs the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year. Naive extrapolation suggests that the equivalent opportunity cost for the freight trucking industry in the United States could be as high as 10% of annual industry revenues.

But that’s not the worst of it; In Seizing Opportunity in Data Quality, published by the MITSloan Management Review on November 27, 2017, Tom Redman asserts that the typical company loses 15% - 25% of revenues due to bad data. As you can imagine, this is not helped by reliance on antiquated approaches to pricing and revenue optimization. This 15% - 25% estimate is the range that each executive responsible for managing a business in supply chain logistics should be focused on.

The Problem: Data Infrastructure to Support Dynamic Pricing Does Not Exist in Logistics

Fundamentally, the problems are these:

First, the logistics industry is a conservative industry that has been slow to adopt and apply complex data analysis and interpretation. Many people employed in supply chain logistics lack a nuanced understanding of how what data is available to them should be used most effectively to solve fundamental business problems - in many cases they do not even understand the full scope of what data they have because that data is stored in disparate and siloed databases.
Second, the small number of data analysts in the industry are mostly left to rely on old and clunky software, at best. In many instances, Microsoft Excel is the state of the art, and pricing information is exchanged by email, phone calls, text messages, and sometimes by paper.
Third, there’s no widely available and scalable underlying data and information infrastructure or architecture that the supply chain logistics industry as a whole can depend on. Such infrastructure would be made up of cloud-enabled: Systems of Record that serve the primary purpose of storing data and making it easily accessible; Decision Analytics Engines that serve the purpose of aiding in the decision-making processes required to actually run the business, and; Systems of Engagement that serve the purpose of being the way that people actually engage with the underlying data and information storage, and decision analytics engines.
Fourth, truckload capacity and rates are affected by such things as customer constraints, equipment availability, lane complexity, load attributes and dimensions, market conditions, seasonality, weather conditions, and market conditions. The relevant data and information that is required for logistics market participants to do business with one another exists in siloes, on systems that are not interconnected, preventing them from being interoperable with each other.

As a result, logistics service providers run their businesses on data supply chains that are a mess, at best.

What market information is available is procured from centralized market data repositories delivering information that is delayed or out of date. The lack of interconnectivity AND interoperability makes it impossible for logistics service providers and their customers to communicate with one another in a frictionless way. The outcome of this state of affairs is that the people who work in supply chain logistics are not empowered with adequate data and information to help them realize their full potential for solving the business problems for which their customers turn to them for help.

This also means that most logistics service providers are in no position to engage in dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing is a pricing and revenue optimization strategy in which a business adjusts the prices for its goods or services in real-time based on constraints like demand, time, and space. It is also often referred to by other names like surge pricing, demand pricing, or time-based pricing. Doing this comprehensively, and at scale requires technology and software.

This is where Greenscreens.AI comes in.

Greenscreens: Personalized Dynamic Pricing From Data Aggregation and Freight Market Intelligence

Greenscreens.AI is building a neutral platform for data aggregation, market intelligence, and dynamic pricing for the truckload spot rate market. Greenscreens combines market data with historical data specific to each customer’s business to create personalized buy and sell recommendations to guide the decisions that each customer makes.

The platform is ideal for freight brokers, empowering them in their interactions with shippers and carriers by: Enabling them to offer buy and sell quotes with confidence that such quotes reflect the most up-to-date market data AND the most relevant private information for each broker’s business; Improving their operational efficiency and productivity; Integrating seamlessly with whatever existing technology each broker uses to run their business, and as a result; Enabling each freight broker to optimize its profitability, all else held equal.

But Greenscreens.AI does not simply provide the freight broker with a suggested quote. Rather, each quote is accompanied by a measure of the probability that the eventual price at which the load is actually booked will be within a certain range. The system also provides users with a gauge of the direction in which supply and demand are heading.

Customers can access Greenscreens.AI’s innovations through;

Greenscreens Web is a version of the platform that provides users with an intuitive and easy to use interface to empower them as they get their work done. By abstracting away the complexity of the underlying systems, Greenscreens Web empowers individual freight brokers and other employees of logistics service providers with only the information they need at their fingertips to make better decisions for their customers. This reflects a trend that is unfolding in logistics technology, and it is one I wrote about in Commentary: Key supply chain innovation issues to consider in a world with VUCA, which was published by FreightWaves on June 11, 2019.
SuperCharger is a version of the Greenscreens.AI platform that plugs seamlessly into whatever transportation management systems (TMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) the customer prefers to work in daily. This ensures that customers do not need to learn new workflows in order to use the system effectively to get their day-to-day work done.
Insights is a management dashboard that enables executives to quickly get a cumulative, top-down view of how their organization is doing. It also has the flexibility to enable them to drill down for more detail if they choose.
RateWizard is the core machine learning and artificial intelligence engine. It allows each customer to tune the parameters of the pricing engine according to the unique and individual decision-making patterns that the customer feels makes them distinct from other logistics service providers against whom they compete for business.
Connect APIs is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows freight brokers to integrate Greenscreens.AI seamlessly into whatever technology systems they are already using, whether those systems are proprietary or off-the-shelf.

The different versions of Greenscreens.AI empower executives, middle-managers, and frontline employees at each of its customers with the data and information they need to make better-informed decisions about how to solve business problems for their customers.

For each of Greenscreens’ customers, this should facilitate greater teamwork by making it easier for higher quality data to suffuse decision-making from the top-down as well as from the bottom-up.

A Team That Has Experience Drawn From Logistics, Data Science, and Technology

The Greenscreens.AI team combines years of experience in spanning logistics, technology, and data science. The platform reflects thousands of hours invested into R&D, and many months spent creating value for early-adopters.

Greenscreens is led by Dawn Salvucci-Favier, CEO & Chief Product Officer. Dawn’s experience in supply chain logistics and transportation spans: Executive Profit & Loss Leadership; Product Marketing & Strategy; Technology Product Management & Product Marketing, and; Business process & Solution Design. She is assisted by a team of highly experienced executives, including Gennady Konovalov, VP of Engineering, and Andrey Machanskis, Chief Financial Officer. Greenscreens also has a seasoned board, and a deep bench of strategic industry advisors.

Greenscreens was founded by Felix Lubashevskiy and Benjamin Gordon. Felix and Benjamin are both experienced executives and investors in supply chain logistics. Benjamin Gordon, who is Cambridge Capital’s founder and an investor in REFASHIOND Seed, first put Greenscreens on REFASHIOND Ventures’ radar in early 2021, when he and I and a number of other volunteers were working on a logistics technology market map that centers the buyers of technology and innovation in supply chain logistics.

Potential Customers Are Actively and Desperately Seeking Solutions

Over the period we have known Greenscreens, it is the pace at which customers have adopted the product that has been most compelling. I have written extensively about the threats that digital immigrant freight brokers face from digital native upstarts. For example: Is disruption finally underway in the freight brokerage industry? (FreightWaves, May 10, 2019); Why digital freight brokers might fail to disrupt the freight brokerage industry (FreightWaves, September 11, 2019); Commentary: Why are digital freight brokers struggling to solve their Uber-scale problems? (FreightWaves, November 5, 2019); Commentary: Digital freight brokers face a moment of truth; (FreightWaves, May 28,2020), and; Commentary: Another freight forwarding disruptor joins the fray (FreightWaves, June 15, 2020), provide coverage of the threats that traditional freight brokers face from new, technology enabled upstarts.

For this reason, our team at REFASHIOND Ventures is cognizant of the forces at play in the freight brokerage markets, and we are equally aware of the great appetite that exists for software innovations that meet the following criteria:

First, they very quickly help to generate more revenue than the alternative OR they very quickly reduce operating costs enough to improve profit margins meaningfully;
Second, they are easy to use and do not require expensive installation or lengthy training periods;
Third, they enable teams to encode the expertise that is embodied in their most skilled and experienced members so that it can then be used to improve overall organizational performance;
Fourth, they impose consistency, help to increase accuracy and efficiency, and reduce errors of omission and commission.
Fifth, by enabling teams to accomplish the preceding four goals, they empower individual freight brokers to do more relationship building AND high value consultative selling with both the shippers AND carriers on whom freight brokerages rely for business.

In my June, 15 2020 article at FreightWaves, I stated that, “According to IBISWorld, in 2019 there were 108,675 freight brokers in the United States. These companies employed 382,955 people. Estimated revenue for the industry was $145.6 billion. It is an industry characterized by low barriers to entry and intense price competition. It is also an industry characterized by regional and industry specialization.”

Freight brokerage is now where the stock market was in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as the adoption of internet-enabled innovations imposed transparency, differential pricing, and disintermediation on financial services (Clemons and Hitt, 2000), the adoption of similar technologies in supply chain logistics promises to transform the experience of shippers, carriers, and intermediaries in supply chain logistics.

Over the course of 2021, Greenscreens has successfully signed up large, medium, and small freight brokers. Moreover, the team significantly exceeded the expectations I developed in early 2021 for what I thought its tally for annual recurring revenues would be by the end of the year. Our sense is that 2022 will be an even bigger year for Greenscreens in terms of customer adoption.

But investors' expectations do not mean very much. Rather, it is a startup’s ability to create value for its customers that matters. To that end, other early-stage startup founders have been bringing up Greenscreens more frequently in conversations I am having with them. They do not realize I know the company till I mention it after hearing them talk about how they rely on it to help them run their business.

Five Star Trucking is a 45 year old, family owned truckload focused logistics company with asset capabilities serving customers throughout the US from its headquarters in Willoughby, Ohio. I asked Joe Gramc, President & CFO, and an investor in REFASHIOND Seed, why Five Star Trucking is considering adopting Greenscreens.

“Greenscreens.AI quite simply helps us to utilize our historical pricing data and make it actionable, fast,” he said.

He continued, “In today's market, pricing seems to be as volatile as ever. Supply chain disruptions from all sides are making it more difficult than ever and it's becoming nearly impossible to manually account for the growing number of variables.”

“Leveraging AI and machine learning in this process is going to be a necessity. Greenscreens.AI allows us to do this without the significant investment of building out and managing a team with all these different skills. In many ways it's pricing data science as a service and we look forward to having a tool that allows us to more accurately quote and know that our pricing will be accurate on both the buy and sell side,” he said.

As I stated in Industry Study: Freight Trucking (#Startups) (Innovation Footprints, November 23, 2016); “The insistence by early stage startups that they will “disrupt” the freight brokerage market overlooks the most important function brokers play; They are arbiters of trust between shippers and truck operators.” I believe that networks and platforms like Greenscreens that empower traditional freight brokers of all sizes to perform at their best have an enormous opportunity to succeed.

As we say at REFASHIOND Ventures, we are #ObsessivelyEnthusiastic about what Greenscreens.AI is building. We are excited to be able to count Tiger Global, Flyer One Ventures, Cambridge Capital, Navigate Ventures, Jones Capital, Red Door Capital, Overton Venture Capital, and Operator Stack Fund as coinvestors.

We are encouraged that downstream investors have awoken to the opportunity in #SupplyChainTech, with the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Smith reporting that Investors Are Piling Into Supply-Chain Technology, and Bessemer Venture Partners recently outlining and publishing their own #SupplyChainTech thesis in Roadmap: Supply Chain Software.

At REFASHIOND Ventures, we couldn’t be more excited to back supply chain technology founders at the early stages of their journey to transform the way the world makes, buys, moves, stores, and consumes the products and services that we all need.