Tai TMS is a next-generation transportation management system built to help freight brokers streamline operations, boost efficiency, and accelerate growth. Combining intelligent automation with deep logistics expertise, Tai empowers brokers to save time, strengthen carrier relationships, and improve profitability across every shipment.
In this episode, we speak with Walter Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software, about their transportation management system (TMS) designed for freight brokers. Tai Software aims to bridge the gap between logistics and technology, providing tools that enhance efficiency and scalability for brokers. The discussion covers the integration of AI in their platform, which automates tasks like email processing and document management, significantly reducing manual work. Walter shares insights on how Tai’s tools have improved operational efficiency and margins for their clients, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement in technology solutions.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Improved margins from 19% to 26% using Tai tools.
- Document processing automation leads to significant efficiency gains.
- A 10-time increase in shipment approvals per hour was achieved.
- Automation reduces manual work in document management.
- Tai’s document processor is integral to operational improvements.
- Leveraging technology can transform business performance.
- Efficiency in logistics can be dramatically enhanced with the right tools.
- Automation allows for better resource allocation in businesses.
- Improved margins can lead to better profitability.
- Investing in technology is crucial for modern businesses.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Tai Software
03:00 – Challenges in Freight Brokerage
06:00 – Role of Technology and AI
09:00 – Email Automation and Efficiency
12:00 – Truckload Quoting and Decision-Making
15:00 – Flexibility in Workflows
18:00 – Real-World Use Cases
21:00 – Platform Evolution and Updates
24:00 – Partnerships and Connectivity
27:00 – Conclusion and Future Outlook
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:00.952)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, senior editor and multimedia producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. Today we are headed into the world of freight tech with a company that’s been powering brokers for over 15 years, and that is Tai Software. So if you haven’t heard of them, Tai builds Tai TMS, that’s transportation management system for short. And it’s an all-in-one platform that helps freight brokers quote, book, and track shipments all in one place. And it’s really designed to automate a lot of, I would say the repetitive stuff, you know, speed up workflows and give teams a clear real-time view of every shipment, whether it’s less than truckload, LTL, or full truckload. Again, every industry has their abbreviations and acronyms, so I’ll try and define each one as I see them.
But yeah, they have a mix of tech talent and freight industry veterans working behind the scenes to make this all possible which I’d say really helps them kind of understand a lot of the challenges and the grind that brokers face every day, right? They’re able to recognize these issues and areas where improvement is really needed and then build tools to help tackle them with the goal of just making everything much more efficient, able to scale smarter and then ultimately just serve customers better.
So joining us to talk more about Tai Software and the TMS Industry is Walter Mitchell or Mitch for short. He’s CEO of Tai Software. Mitch, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (01:33.759)
Thank you for having me today and thank you for that great introduction. It was very well said and I was in the industry for a long time now and helping freight brokers is what we’re here to do. So thank you for that and thanks for having me.
Beau Hamilton (01:43.725)
Awesome. Yeah, glad to have you here. Let’s start at that kind of inception point before we get into some of the technical components, because we’ll get there too. But what inspired the founding of Tai TMS, and what problems were you trying to solve at the time?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (02:00.843)
The primary goal was to be a good partner for freight brokers. That’s what Tai has been out to do from the start is to see if we can help freight brokers have a technology partner that facilitates their growth, facilitates their ability to do well in their area. And what we find is that freight brokers are good at the logistics side of the business, usually not so good at the technology side. I’ve always been really strong on the technology side. So being able to bring those two tool sets together and help freight brokers do what they do and leverage technology. That’s been the purpose of Tai from the beginning.
So really about being that good partnership and bringing good close relationships back and technology tools back to the freight brokerage to allow them to be more effective, more efficient and do their job better.
Beau Hamilton (02:52.846)
Yeah, you bridge that gap, simplify the chaos of a broker’s day to day, right? What was your background prior to TMS?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (03:04.235)
Software development has always been my area. I’ve been a technology geek since day one. I’ve always loved tech. I’ve always loved computers and building software. that building of technology has been kind of in me from the beginning. I got a computer science degree to get started. And then early on, I started building a rate coding tool for less than truckload freight.
This was back a good number of years ago now. It turns out I’m turning into an older guy, but that gives me some experience, right? So, it started out building that LTL rating solution and then from there into TMS. And it’s been all about building that platform system for freight brokers since.
Beau Hamilton (03:49.08)
Very cool. taking that kind of bringing that tech knowledge into an area that’s not inherently like used to the software world, right?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (03:57.513)
Yeah, and trying to do it in a way that’s consumable, right? Because it’s not just about having great tech. It’s about having great tech that provides an ROI for the business. It’s about having great tech that your team can actually use. And that’s one of the things that we really strive to do for our great brokerage partners.
Beau Hamilton (04:16.93)
Yeah, so what are some of the common kind of operational bottlenecks you see that brokers face that you felt like you could solve with the software platform you have?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (04:26.443)
It’s about efficiencies in different operational tasks. So some of the areas are around managing documents. Some of the areas are around managing emails. Some of the areas are just about managing exceptions and freight. One of the things that we know is that as a freight broker, you’re going to run into problems with shipments. And what we want to do is highlight those challenge areas to the freight broker so that they can manage that part of the business and help their shipper, the customer who’s trying to get that freight moved, work through the issues. So the goal is like, let’s get the easy shipments moving, make sure they flow really nicely, and let the broker and the shipper be aware when something goes a little crazy. So that’s kind of the fundamental area.
And so when we talk about operational efficiency, it’s about streamlining every step. It’s about making sure that when a shipment picks up that we can automatically notify the shipper. It’s about making sure that as an appointment’s getting scheduled or if an appointment needs to be scheduled, that we know about it in a timely manner so we can get those built and set up in there in time. And those are just a couple of the tools that Tai builds in to help make it more efficient for freight brokers.
Beau Hamilton (05:40.622)
That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, you have so many moving pieces. You have channels of communications, calls and emails, like you mentioned, and systems that are at play. If they don’t talk to each other, it’s just going to bog the whole process down. Yeah, a big part of the efficiency gains, of course, is a lot of the automation components you have in your platform, which I would say is really what Tai’s known for. And nowadays, unless you’ve been
I don’t know, living under a rock, like every software solution is powered by AI. You sometimes it’s true AI. Other times it’s, it’s companies jumping on the marketing bandwagon and rehashing some of the same automations and whatnot. but I’m curious to hear your take on, on AI in this space. Are you currently using AI powered tools to improve, you know, the speed and accuracy in freight operations? And, and if so, how, how is this new technology like taking your automation game to the next level?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (06:39.499)
AI is a mandatory tool for any technology company. If you don’t have a good AI strategy as a technology company, then you’re really being already caught up well behind the curve. But for freight brokers, AI is a powerful tool for them as well. And that’s again, our responsibility as your technology partner is to help bring some of that cutting edge technology into the system in a way that it can be used. And so one of the things that’s important at Tai is not only are we using AI, but we’re using AI in places that bring a return on investment to the freight broker so that you can take advantage of the tool and see an actual improvement using it today. And we’ve been working with AI for a number of years.
So one of the tools we use is our emailing tool. And what that does is it’ll process incoming emails and it’ll extract information from them and create shipments in the TMS. It can also extract information and get updates on shipments. So a lot of the email spray brokers get will be things like, hey, where’s my shipment? What’s going on with my shipment? The AI tool that we use can extract that, attach it to the shipment, generate a response and automate sending it back to the customer without any interaction from the broker or with minimal interaction from the broker.
And then also documents. A lot of freight documents come in and need to be managed and need to be worked with. So what we do in Tai is we’re able to take those documents, extract contextual information, link them to the right shipments, and fulfill part of the process without having the broker do all the extra work. So the goal here with our AI is to reduce the work the broker’s doing by 80%. And if we can do that, then the AI is showing an effective path today.
Beau Hamilton (08:37.72)
Very cool. So you have implemented some of these AI tools in the last couple of years, right? Two or three years. How does the platform look now compared to when you first started? Is it unrecognizable with some of these different automated features?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (08:54.399)
That’s a great question. Over the years, the technology platform changes so fast. It’s an area that I feel is really important as well is, as I say, we’re a technology partner. That also means that we have an obligation to make sure that we’re providing good quality technology to our customers, to the freight brokers. And that means it has to change all the time. So one of things that I find interesting is that every once in a will think like, okay, well, I want to bring in a piece of software and I want it to be the same for a long period of time. But you don’t want your business to be the same for a long period of time. Why would you want your software product to be the same?
And so at Tai, we constantly update. We run updates to our software every day and we publish major updates once a month, meaning that we just really notify our customers. But every day something new is happening in the system. And the goal is to keep the technology evolving as fast as your business is, as fast as the industry is, so that you always have technology that’s up to date, that you always have technology that can take advantage of the best tools that are out there. And now with that comes some of the other side of you have to implement some of these cool tools. And we try to help our brokers do that as well, so that you have the tools available and then you have a pathway to learn how to use them.
Beau Hamilton (10:16.408)
So I want to talk about some of those tools and those features. So I know one feature, and you alluded to this or mentioned this earlier, was Tai’s email integration. I think it’s often highlighted as a key differentiator from the competition. Can you elaborate on how it works in practice and what measurable efficiency gains customers experience from using it?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (10:40.893)
And Tai’s email automation tool is designed to reduce the workload in your email by about 80%. So it’s not meant to replace your email. It’s not meant to eliminate email from your work paths. But what it is meant to do is to eliminate a high percentage of the added work that you do every time you process an email. So for example, it’ll pull in information, extract contextual information from an email, create a shipment in the system, and then notify the appropriate person that, a new shipment’s been created that needs to be quoted, or a new shipment’s been created that may need to be some kind of handling to happen. And when that happens, what we’ve done is eliminated all the work of, one, checking your mailbox, two, entering the basic information, and then three, preparing the quote. All of that’s already done, saving you a huge amount of time.
Now, what it doesn’t do is it’s not meant to replace the broker. It’s meant to help them. We still want the freight broker to look at it. We still want the freight broker to make sure that the shipment makes sense. We still want the freight broker to add value that they add, which is expertise in the freight industry. What we don’t want them doing is the data entry work. And so at Tai, our email tool, it’s been around for about four years. So it’s pretty mature. And that’s one of the differentiators is it’s not just an AI tool. It’s an AI tool that’s heavily tailored to the freight brokerage.
Beau Hamilton (12:10.21)
Yeah, I was going to say like, you want to kind of strike that balance, right? You want to focus on, still like allowing the freight broker to, to focus on the relationships they have with the clients and like the bigger strategy. So if you’re able to automate some of the kind of mundane tasks and data side of things, and allow more of that relationship building component, that’s probably more fulfilling for the freight broker anyway. I think that’s a good strategy.
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (12:33.577)
Yeah, exactly. Allowing them to do the part of the job that they have the expertise in, right? And eliminate some of that extra work. And I can tell you, it’s a little selfish too. I’d love that in my job too, right? Like let’s eliminate the extra work and the data entry components and focus on the part that we really enjoy. Focus on the part that lets us leverage our expertise. And that’s what our emailing tool is designed to do.
Beau Hamilton (13:00.29)
Now, another area that stood out was Tai’s truckload quoting page. How does this quoting page help brokers ultimately protect things like their margins and just win more business in really competitive markets?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (13:15.135)
The Truckload Quoting page is designed to give you all the information you need in context to your decision making process. So what that means is that we bring in information from all these different data sources, from your historical shipments, we bring information in from carriers that you prefer, we bring information in from outside tools, digital freight matching tools, we bring information in from fraud prevention tools, we’re bringing all this information in from these different sources, aggregating into one place where the freight broker can see and make decisions in context to the work they’re doing. So it allows them to be really fast because you get to see the pricing that you should be proposing. You get to see fraud prevention things. You get to see all of this right on a single page while you’re making the decision around rating, while you’re making the decision around carrier selection.
And what that does is it allows for even brokers who are newer in the industry to make pro-level decisions, to make really wise decisions, because they’re not jumping back and forth to five or six different places and not trying to aggregate and keep these things in context. They’re seeing it all right there in front of them. So that’s why the truckload quoting page is so valuable is it brings all their information in context right back into one place where they can see it and make decisions dynamically.
Beau Hamilton (14:38.85)
I love that. Yeah. I mean, as the saying goes, data is power, right? And so you have all the, that rate data and historical data and whatnot in one place. I think the results kind of speak for themselves. I mean, you could just move quicker and more accurately, I suppose. You’re not like missing anything bouncing back and forth to different sources.
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (14:55.157)
Yeah, it allows us to look really smart, right? We’re making smart decisions because we have the tools in front of us to make those decisions easier.
Beau Hamilton (15:07.702)
Now, kind of circling back to the automation side of things and that side of the platform, in a space where automation can kind of sometimes feel rigid, like it functions in a certain way through a fixed set of parameters, how would you say Tai balances powerful automation with the flexibility that brokers really need for their workflows and for the different requirements of their customers?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (15:32.683)
Flexibility workflows is a really key piece of a high quality TMS and a mature technology partner. The reason for it is even though at the end of the day, freight brokers are very similar, we all have different things that we do. We have different ways that we want to communicate with our customers, different ways we want to communicate with our brokers. And so what we’ve been working on at Tai and part of our objective is to make sure that we have all that flexibility and that we have the dynamic workflows, but we allow the brokers to customize them and change them and modify the business logic to meet their needs, as well as what normal brokerage needs to do.
So you have all the tools that you need for normal brokerage, plus the ability to fine tune them and really specify like what works for my business, what works for the way I want to run my freight. And that’s a real key value that we bring into Tai is to allow you to do that without the need for a professional services team, without the need to be writing code. You can build workflow automations. You can build these custom processes with just a few clicks. They’re really easy, really fast.
Beau Hamilton (16:44.834)
Yeah, that’s great. Again, it comes down to the balance of adaptability, flexibility. And then, I don’t know, I think the having the kind of still having the human in the loop, human judgment side of things to kind of nurturing those relationships and whatnot is really important.
I’m curious about some of your real world use cases. Now you don’t have to name names, of course, but can you share an example of maybe a customer that you’ve helped kind scale their operations with Tai?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (17:03.123)
So there’s a couple of examples that come to mind here. One of them is a customer that we helped improve their margins from 19% to 26% by taking advantage of the truckload quoting page. This is a really compelling story for them in that what they did was they asked their brokers to start using the truckload quoting page in the best way possible to take advantage of all the tools in there the right way. And they did that by adding incentives to the brokers who were running it, and what they found was their margins went from 19% to 26% by using the tools that are available in Tai the most effective ways. So that big improvement was tremendous to see.
I’ve got another example too that I like to share on the other side. And one of the reasons is that it’s not just about the operation side that makes Tai effective. It’s also the accounting side. And so there’s another example of a customer that started taking advantage of our document processor. And when they started taking advantage of document processor, they saw the number of shipments that their accounting person could approve go from around four to 40 in a given hour.
And so that’s almost a 10-time improvement on their efficiency. And all of that came from letting the document processor handle that incoming document, allowing it to extract the information and shortcutting the manual work that they were doing to manage those documents. So they saw a 10-time improvement just by taking advantage of the document processor that’s just built into Tai.
Beau Hamilton (18:45.048)
That’s amazing. Yeah, that’s crazy. I’m a big picture guy. And so when I think of like the, some of these software tools can improve an efficiency by a factor of 10 and you, you ripple, multiply that out across an entire industry or a sector, it’s amazing to think about the habits that’s changing everything.
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (19:03.817)
Yeah, and I love seeing our customers implement things like that where they bring in just one component and it allows that level of improvement. And it’s kind of difficult sometimes because as a freight broker or as a business owner, we get caught up in the process we have. And sometimes we don’t take a step back and say, like, where can I make an improvement? And if I do make an improvement, what’s that going to do to the business? Imagine if you make two or three of those kinds of improvements through your organization. If you go from 19 to 26% margin, you factor your accounting team by 10x, like next thing you know, your business is running in a completely different profile.
Beau Hamilton (19:44.366)
Right. Yeah, totally. And then, yeah, I mean, there’s so many moving parts and components of your platform. So like, if you just were to focus in on the email tool and how that helps improve performance, I mean, and then, you know, let alone some of quote page allowing you to not have to go to all these different sources. So yeah, just kind of learning how to adapt the platform to best suit your needs.
I think that’s huge. Super interesting. But yeah, thanks for sharing. I love those tangible kind of results that really kind of resonate and just show what automation and AI can do, right?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (20:26.409)
Yeah, exactly. And that’s what we really want to share with the industry too, is that, you know, yeah, we’re here to be a TMS partner, but we really want to help our freight brokers be more effective. And we want to help give them the tools and share with them some best practices that we see across the industry to help them get those efficiencies. And one of the things that I think it’s missed sometimes is as a technology partner, we see hundreds and hundreds of freight brokers, actually probably thousands at this point of freight brokers and the way they run their business.
And we’re able to share that with our customers on some of the best ways to do it, some of the most effective ways, as well as some of the least effective ways. We try to discourage those, obviously, right? But we get the advantage of being able to see it from a bigger picture and see a more holistic view of the industry. Rather than when we’re running a business, we kind of get a little isolated in our own segment and our own pathway on how we execute.
Beau Hamilton (21:25.56)
Yeah, I mean, you get comfortable with doing a task a certain way. And naturally, you’re kind of resistant to change too. I think educating people about the better solutions and things out there that could really help really improve your workflow, I think, is a huge component.
Now let’s say there are prospective customers listening right now. Maybe we have some brokers or logistics companies listening who are just interested in some of these operational gains, efficiency gains. What would you say is the smartest first step to take with Tai that would help quickly capture some real value?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (22:00.123)
The first step in capturing real value using Tai is to be prepared for change. I think that’s the number one thing. If you’re prepared to evaluate your processes and put a little change into place, you’ll get those advantages. Now, when it comes to tangible things you should execute on, we have a couple. Document processor, our email processing tool, the ability to use workflow automation, and then also just taking advantage of some of the automated tasks that happen through the freight process and the connectivity to partners.
So I just unloaded a whole bunch of things there that our freight brokers can use to show efficiency. But the place I’d say to start is just pick any one of them. Just pick one of them. Any small piece will help make your broker more, brokerage more efficient. And then once you finish that one, take another step and then take another step.
And after you’ve taken a few steps, even after the first step, you’re going to start seeing so many more efficiencies and you’re going to see so many improvements in your business that can really add tremendous value.
Beau Hamilton (23:08.77)
That’s a good strategy. Yeah. Focus. Don’t get overwhelmed with the whole feature set. Focus in on one area and then work your way out from there. That’s a good approach. I try to implement in just all sorts of different everyday tasks, right?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (23:21.597)
Yeah. And it really comes into when we’re onboarding a new customer, that same kind of strategy. When you’re first onboarding to Tai, you’ll want to come in and start making some changes. And you should because you’re switching to a new TMS. So you’re going to have to make some changes from your prior system. But what I usually recommend is for people to make a minimal set of changes when they first come into the TMS, but plan for making more changes two months later.
Because there’s a lot of change management that happens when we’re switching TMSs and switching our platform of record. So when we come in, we do that, we make that change, we teach our team how to use it, we get them used to the basics, and then we start making incremental improvements. And what that means is over the course of six months, we’ve really implemented the entire strategy around that change. And what that does is it allows our team to adapt. It allows our team to unlearn some of their past habits. And it allows our team to absorb in a little more timely of a fashion.
Beau Hamilton (24:26.926)
How does Tai’s tech ecosystem and partnerships that you have further extend the value brokers can unlock with the platform?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (24:34.997)
Tai’s ecosystem is built around openness, connectivity, and flexibility. That’s one of the key differentiators, is that not only do we have the ability to connect to some of the great partners that are out there and support freight brokers, but we also have an open platform that allows anyone to connect to us.
So it’s really kind of great and amazing, like when we go to trade shows and we’ll see a partner that’s doing something really compelling in the industry. And they’ll say, we have an integration to Tai. And I may not have even heard of this company yet, but they have it because we have the openness in our platform to allow them to connect to us, to allow them to get deep contextual work done against our TMS, still keeping the TMS as the platform of record, but adding that value that new partner is adding. So that kind of thing is what makes the Tai ecosystem so powerful is the ability to have that open connectivity, the ability to have the flexibility, and the ability to support brokers and new technologies as they come up.
Beau Hamilton (25:38.126)
Yeah, that’s really neat. So not only are you integrating with certain partners, but you’re allowing other partners to integrate your solutions just natively. Awesome. Yeah, that’s huge. I mean, integrations, the more integrations, the better you have people using tools that have been around for X amount of years. So by being able to incorporate them and work with them, that just makes your platform all the more appealing, right?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (26:03.917)
Yeah, exactly. And it allows, it really allows the brokers to get everything they need in context. And I talked about that a little earlier, but we don’t want to close the system out. We want to open the system and allow you to make decisions and see everything together. And it’s so much more valuable than having the protection, right? Or than having the people gated off. We want that openness. We want the connectivity.
Beau Hamilton (26:28.12)
Yeah, nobody likes a walled off garden, right? So we’ve covered a lot of kind of the AI automation tools Tai’s built over the years and how the platform has really evolved, so looking ahead, I’m just curious, like, where do see this going? How do you continue this evolution from here, especially as brokers navigate, you know, tighter margins, more competitive markets, etcetera, etcetera. Where do you see this going?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (26:56.597)
Tai is going to stay true to its fundamentals, being a strong technology partner for freight brokers. And we do that by understanding the freight brokers business and providing technology tools that bring efficiency. Now that’s our guiding light. That’s what we’re aiming to do is to, to always be focused on that. But what does that mean for the next couple of years? It means taking advantage of AI. It means continuing to push automation forward. It means being able to be flexible in how we support a freight brokerage.
And so those are the areas that we’re gonna continue to develop and grow and make sure that the platform continues to be the number one TMS available for freight brokerage. And doing all that, but still staying true to being a good strong partnership that understands freight brokerage well.
Beau Hamilton (27:43.166)
That’s a great answer. You mentioned earlier, I believe, that you have a monthly release cadence for new features, new improvements, bug fixes, stuff like that. Is that right?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (27:54.607)
Yeah, we actually do daily updates to our platform, but every month we make announcements. So what we found is that we do so many updates that we can’t announce them in real time. So we hold the announcements and once a month we do announcements of what’s going on and what we’ve done. And we do webinars and try to communicate to our customers some of the cool things they do. As well as once a year we put on a user summit to really kind of educate and share and build community around the Tai, the Thai family and the group of customers that we have.
So we spend a lot of time trying to help share information to our customers and help share information with freight brokers so that they can continue to evolve their business and we can continue to be that strong technology partner.
Beau Hamilton (28:38.122)
Very cool. I’m excited to see where it goes from here. For those interested in learning more about the platform or maybe wanting to get in touch with you and your team, where should they go? Where would you send them?
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (28:50.915)
You can always find us at TaiSoftware.com. That’s T-A-I, software.com. You can find us all over on LinkedIn. And then we’re also at all the industry trade shows as well. So we’re happy to meet up with anybody in person at any of those events, as well as online at www.taisoftware.com.
Beau Hamilton (29:07.558)
T-A-I, software.com. All right. Well, thank you. That’s Walter Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software. Thanks again for all the insights and everything you shared with us today.
Walter (Mitch) Mitchell (29:16.749)
Thank you so much for having me today. This was really great.
Beau Hamilton (29:18.45)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all for upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.