Benchmarking is vital for all industries, supporting continuous improvement and strategic decision-making. This approach helps organizations gain a competitive advantage, manage risk and improve customer satisfaction. Beyond internal growth, benchmarking extends to supplier and partner relations, fostering collaboration and strengthening supply chain relationships.
While benchmarking empowers industries to adapt and excel in a competitive environment, Isometric Technologies’ (ISO) co-founders, Chief Operating Officer John Stauffer and CEO Brian Cristol, found the shipping industry lacked the innovation for shippers and other industry stakeholders to understand how their supply chain relations really compared to others.
“Shippers get solicited by a couple hundred different trucking companies and brokers every week, and yet there is no way to evaluate these partners and we thought that was remarkable,” Stauffer told FreightWaves.
“We are missing a piece of the whole equation. Pricing is very well served by technology and is a well-understood component of the market whereas service is a total black box with so much fragmentation, we think that there is a great opportunity to bring some clarity and eliminate a lot of waste by introducing service standards or what we call the FICO score for freight,” he said.
The benchmarking facilitator is currently selling its product to shippers and brokers, helping both parties not just get a full picture of their networks’ service quality but validate their data and create an industry standard.
“Our products solve a big pain point around data reconciliation between shippers, brokers and their transportation networks. Aligning this data appropriately helps them understand the root cause of supply chain inefficiencies. Now they are able to understand bottlenecks while also measuring the cost of service,” said Stauffer.
He explained how the broker tool particularly not only helps with service improvement but also helps shipper and carrier sales teams focus on what they are good at and where carrier networks can improve.
“A core value driver for brokers is leveraging the benchmarking from a sales perspective and helping you sell objectively with data into prospective customers and existing customers. Better understanding your carrier selection and being data-driven with how you source and procure for carrier selection, while also holding your network accountable for [service level agreements] helps brokers become more scientific and data-driven with how they are actually securing capacity,” Stauffer said.
ISO products recently earned a spot on FreightWaves’ FreightTech 25, coming in at No. 22.
Managing risk
While ISO’s primary goal is to help customers better understand their networks’ service capabilities, the company also focuses on providing risk assessments to avoid future service disruptions.
ISO recently partnered with carrier identity provider Highway to improve shipper and broker carrier selection and onboarding processes.
“With this partnership, we start to unlock some real powerful automation from a procurement standpoint. As you think about the decisions that a carrier rep is making when they are looking for a truck to source a load, Highway does the front-end vetting to make sure they are safe to work with. From there we make sure that the service requirements are met on the back end and that the carrier can deliver at the highest performance level,” said Stauffer.
FICO for supply chains
ISO is currently working with customers servicing all types of industries, including consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, manufacturing, and raw materials, giving the company a large pool of shipper, receiver, broker and carrier data to build a neutral benchmarking product.
As the company grows, its goal is to offer a standardized performance measurement that extends to the entire supply chain of products.
“We understand that carriers are probably baking in costs when they know they are going to have to deliver at a receiver that is going to detain their driver for six hours. But to have a score that is understood and accepted by the industry to help inform pricing decisions like that will ultimately incentivize every supply chain actor to improve efficiencies, eliminate waste and raise the bar for the entire ecosystem,” said Stauffer.
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