Freight Players Push Market Standardization

Three major freight players are joining forces to standardize scheduling information among shippers, carriers and brokerages.

Convoy, J.B. Hunt and Uber Freight announced the formation of a Scheduling Standards Consortium “to establish freight appointment scheduling standards that provide consistent visibility into the supply chain,” according to the group’s website.

More specifically, the group’s goal is to develop a formal set of freight appointment scheduling application programming interface (API) standards, according to the group’s Dec. 5 release.

“Scheduling system and interface fragmentation is a point of friction amongst carriers, brokers, and shippers,” the group explained in its release. “As the industry turns increasingly to an integrated network of providers and solutions to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of each shipment, it has become increasingly important to define and share a consistent data architecture and API standard for the distribution of scheduling information.”

The group hopes to have an initial set of agreed-upon standards and documentation in place in the first quarter of 2023. The first set of standards will focus on full truckload freight.