Big name freight companies partner on new API standard

Convoy, J.B. Hunt and Uber Freight announced last week that they have partnered to create the Scheduling Standards Consortium (SSC) in order for industry leaders to come together and build a standard for full truckload freight appointment scheduling. 

This will be the “freight industry’s first formal set of appointment scheduling application programming interface (API) standards​,” according to the announcement. “Complex, pervasive, industry-wide challenges such as this require collaborative, industry-wide solutions; the makeup of the SSC’s founding members underscores the need to standardize how information is exchanged around scheduling shipments.” 

Bill Driegert, co-founder and head of operations at Uber Freight, said the goal is to publish the standards in the first quarter of 2023. 

“Between now and Q1, our plan is to bring more parties into this and get closer to a publishable standard,” he said. 

Driegert explained why competitors are working together. “This is a point of friction that we all suffer from and it’s not a place where we are all looking to compete. It is a place where we would all benefit from collaboration.” 

Brooks McMahon, chief business development officer at Convoy, agreed. “We decided we are going to be better working together rather than each of us investing lots of time and money to solve the problem on our own.” 

Once there is a standard, various systems will be able to work together in a seamless way versus having different standards across all systems and companies building their own interfaces.

“This is only step one. Down the road, we’ll see all the efficiencies, new use cases and benefits of having just a standard way of talking,” Driegert said.

“Between now and the end of the year, we are having lots of conversations with a variety of [industry experts] with the expectation of getting started in Q1,” McMahon said. 

For more information or to get involved in the conversation, visit www.FreightAPIs.org.