The Scheduling Standards Consortium (SSC) has added seven partners as it prepares new open application programming interface scheduling standards to be released by the end of the year.
Digital freight brokers Uber Freight and Convoy and logistics provider J.B. Hunt formed the SSC in December to begin standardizing trade data and synthesizing scheduling technology.
Related: Convoy, J.B. Hunt and Uber Freight call for standardized scheduling API
New members announced Monday are Arrive Logistics, Blue Yonder, Coyote Logistics, E2open, Echo, One Network Enterprises and Oracle. With additional members, SSC now has transportation management system providers, fulfillment services and large brokerage service providers to lean on for better industry collaboration.
“Arrive is eager to help lead this industrywide initiative in advocating for and developing solutions to address issues impacting our partners. We look forward to digging in with our technology team to complement the efforts put forth by the group to ensure a positive outcome for all stakeholders,” Michael Senftleber, Arrive’s chief technology officer, said.
Derek Gittoes, vice president of supply chain management product strategy at Oracle agreed and pointed out the importance of software providers’ contributions to the SSC.
“Scheduling third-party carriers and logistics service providers remains a painfully manual process that can be complex and time-consuming, leading to errors,” Gittoes said. “Joining the SSC will enable us to contribute to a set of API standards that will help our customers further automate logistics processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs and carbon emissions, and optimize service levels.”
Standard releases soon to come
These new collaborators will be substantial contributors as the SSC plans to provide a number of standard releases throughout 2023.
The SSC plans to release its System Interaction Model and additional documentation by the end of this quarter and a full technical standard and API design, including a TMS implementation of that design, by the end of this year.
“The new members have already given some great feedback,” said Stuart Scott, executive vice president and chief information officer at J.B. Hunt. “We are creating a common language so we can share information easily and can optimize our systems better and get rid of industry waste. We are really building off of everything that these participants are bringing to the table.”
Watch now: Looking at new, streamlined APIs
Bill Dreigert, co-founder and head of operations at Uber Freight, told FreightWaves that “TMS providers are already going down this path of trying to implement these [scheduling] capabilities into their systems. It’s a perfect time to have these conversations because our objective is to make sure that as new technologies come to the market for scheduling, we are all using the same interface and standard API format.”
Bringing these seven new members to the group has already helped improve data capturing, including standardizing reason codes for changing or canceling appointments and other simple scheduling experiences.
SSC said it will continue to add collaborators, as more participants mean an unbiased system that can bring greater efficiency to a fragmented product in the industry.
“This isn’t about giving an advantage to those that are part of the organizing committee. It’s that all see benefits from doing this,” said Dan Lewis, founder and CEO of Convoy. “We are trying to set this up in a way that as many people as possible will end up participating.”
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