JDA and J.B. Hunt partnership focuses on increased pricing availability and access to capacity

Earlier this week, JDA Software Inc., a provider of AI-driven supply chain management services, and freight transportation services provider J.B. Hunt said they are meshing their respective flagship offerings, with the integration of JDA’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) platform-which provides business planning, execution, delivery and workforce solutions, with AI and machine learning to better predict prevent disruptions, and J.B. Hunt 360, a digital freight matching platform.

The companies said that this collaboration’s objective is to provide shippers with increased pricing visibility and access to available capacity, adding that through the duo of API processing capabilities from each of its respective platforms, shippers leveraging JDA Transportation Management, the company’s TMS, will gain access to dynamic quotes detailed pricing, and real-time rate updates, as well.

J.B. Hunt and JDA said that this collaboration increases operational efficiency for shippers using JDA Transportation Management, noting that shippers can access the digital freight marketplace through J.B. Hunt 360, when they need to secure spot market capacity. What’s more, they added that rates and pricing will be generated by considering the historical and industry information captured by both platforms, providing a near true market price and automating a time-consuming process.  

“Customers want a more efficient way to do business, and integrating these two platforms will provide JDA and J.B. Hunt 360 users with the information needed to make timely decisions,” said Shelley Simpson, executive vice president, chief commercial officer, and president of highway services at J.B. Hunt, in a statement. “Many of our customers already use JDA Transportation Management, so uniting it with J.B. Hunt 360 modernizes our connectivity to allow carriers and shippers to see rate updates and get dynamic quoting in real-time.” 

A JDA spokeswoman told LM that this is the first time JDA and J.B. Hunt have teamed up, explaining that J.B. Hunt’s market leadership in digital freight matching and the overlap between major market participants and the JDA customer base was the basis for collaboration.

“In fact, 40% of JB Hunt’s customer base was already using JDA Transportation Management, so it was a natural fit,” she said. “The biggest benefit is JDA providing a common gateway to the J.B. Hunt service offering and allowing the JDA shipper customer base a more seamless approach to connecting to the service offering.  It provides a more frictionless environment to gain access to these types of services.  It looks to better manage these transactions and minimize manual steps and other efforts in legacy implementations. Secondly, the ability to access real-time market pricing throughout the transportation order fulfillment cycle is unique in this combination. Now, iteratively throughout the transportation order lifecycle, they can go to the spot market first and automatically make updates. This was previously a very manual process. Now, we are introducing new opportunities to market pricing on a real-time basis.”