Carrier Management and Rate Shopping Platform
Enhanced the in-house WMS carrier management capability with a configurable rate shopping engine to save on carrier shipping costs.
The Context
Situation
The company has contracts with multiple third party national and regional carriers that offer significantly lower shipping rates due to the bulk volume of shipments. Due to the static carrier configuration in the in-house WMS, the shipments get allocated to a fixed set of carriers pre-configured by the system admin. Due to this limitation, the shipping rates of other carriers are not considered at the time of shipping the orders, leading to extra spending on shipping costs.
The Approach
Insight
The in-house WMS could map only one carrier per client per warehouse - so every shipment defaulted to that carrier, even when cheaper regional or national options existed under negotiated contracts. With no shipping cost visibility built in, spend went untracked, and promised shipment volumes were never met - costing the organisation discounted rates at contract renewal and eroding carrier trust.
The real problem wasn't the WMS itself - it was the missing ability to tap carrier APIs (all publicly available) for real-time rate comparison and cost-optimal carrier assignment. Any fix had to slot into existing warehouse workflows without disrupting them.
Goals
My goals were simple. I had to:
- Build a rate shopping engine that would replace the existing carrier management module in the WMS
- Define the architecture of the rate shopping engine to make it configurable
- Make sure the implementation of this new feature must not change the operational flow on the ground
- Instrument the relevant metrics that would define the outcome of this implementation
- Extend the rate shopping engine to a new product that would enable customers to on-board multiple carriers and perform real-time rate shopping to select the best suited carrier as per the business requirements
Navigation
Led end-to-end development of a rate shopping engine as a WMS enhancement, later extended into a stand-alone product.
MVP (pilot, 2 warehouses, 3 clients): Architected the engine within the WMS, integrated UPS, FedEx, DHL, auto-allocated cheapest carrier, and captured shipping-cost data for visibility - delivering ~15% savings in the first two weeks.
Phase 2 (10 clients, 30 warehouses): Added OnTrac and Better Trucks, introduced cheapest-vs-fastest configuration, and built a downloadable cost-breakdown report for the transportation team.
Phase 3 (new product): Built a full TMS - user/client/FC/carrier config, order management, RBAC, order-level rate comparison across all carriers, shipment tracking with exception handling, engine configuration UI, and savings dashboards - giving the team complete rate visibility and validated cost impact.
The Results
Achievement
The biggest win for the transportation team, apart from the substantial cost savings, was the clear visibility of shipping cost comparison and the cost breakup. This enabled the transportation team to be proactive in managing carrier configurations. Based on the results of cost savings achieved till date, the transportation team has projected a total savings of close to $300,000 per year in shipping costs.
Learnings
Small, fast pilots build the strongest case for platform investment - proving 15% savings in two warehouses within two weeks earned trust for a full-scale build far more effectively than a large upfront rollout would have. Enhancing the existing WMS first, before building the new product, let the team validate the core hypothesis with minimal risk before committing further.