Spartan Logistics Services

Business Challenge

While in the process of imple­menting a new TMS (trans­porta­tion management system), Spartan Logistics Services won new business with a national grocery chain. As a condition of doing business, Spartan was required by their customer to go paperless and implement the standard set of motor carrier EDI documents (the 204 Load Tender, the 990 Load Tender Response, the 214 Shipment Status Message, and the 210 Freight Invoice). 

Spartan turned to Klein­schmidt for help in quickly deploying a mission critical solution that would meet their customer’s require­ments, help them retain the new business with the grocery chain, and build the foundation for meeting the expected EDI require­ments of future customers. 

“Brand recognition is essential,” said Amber Romano, Chief Operating Officer of Spartan Logistics Services. ​“We knew that [Klein­schmidt] was someone we could partner with, and it would create the comfort to gain momentum with a potential customer.”

The Klein­schmidt Solution

After consid­er­a­tion of Spartan’s technical resources, project timeline and a potential future move to a different in-house technology stack, we moved forward with imple­menting Freight­Launch, the new digital freight enablement platform we built to leverage our trans­porta­tion data expertise in order to help companies fully comply with their customers’ EDI and digital document require­ments in short order. 

The Freight­Launch platform helps companies like Spartan to bridge the digital gap when tran­si­tioning between TMS platforms, enterprise technology or software providers without inter­rupting critical (and mandatory) business processes such as EDI or digital freight invoicing that are already in place. In the case of Spartan Logistics Services, Freight­Launch helped them to quickly and easily launch a full scale EDI imple­men­ta­tion with a brand name national grocery store chain in under two weeks. 

“We only have some many hours in an already long day,” Romano says. ​“The ease of using Freight­Launch has allowed us to focus on problems, to put out fires, and to chase other oppor­tu­ni­ties versus working in a cumbersome system that slows us down all day.”

We know the data better than anyone else: Our experience in helping companies of all sizes implement EDI and meet rigorous shipper require­ments goes back over 30 years. In building the foundation of Freight­Launch, we’ve combined that with a massive library of documents and data from shippers and carriers alike in order to build a templating system that enables our imple­men­ta­tion team to set up new trading partners in as little as 48 hours — not the oft-quoted 4 to 8 weeks. 

“In our industry, time is money. But more so, speed to accomplish a task equals ability and knowledge to your customer, and it creates a sense of security that they’ve selected the correct partner,” said Romano. ​“Klein­schmidt was able to help us get up and running with onboarding and training in such a manner that the customer didn’t have to feel any bumps in the road.”

As Spartan Logistics Services continues to grow and seek out the business of other top tier customers, our team’s wide breadth of experience and strong rela­tion­ships across the freight, retail, and manu­fac­turing industries will be key in enabling them to serve shippers at a broader scale without needing to focus on the nuts and bolts of the underlying technology. 

“We want to continue to grow the brand on not only a national level but a global scale,” Romano says. ​“And we want to make sure that we can navigate any scenario that the customer puts in front of us. We believe that the transfer and control of data are more critical now than ever, and we know that Klein­schmidt is a partner that can assist us in our efforts.”