Freight transportation software developer SMC3 and routing, mileage and mapping software developer ALK Technologies on Monday, Jan. 17, announced the creation of a seamless interface between ALK’s PC Miler Web Services and the SMC3 RateWare XL rating product.
“This new interface gives customers a single point of access to a complete range of mileage, transit times and rate content, enabling them to conduct highly accurate shipment route planning, execution and optimization,” says Warren Patterson, SMC³ senior vice president of product strategy and development.
Under a newly formalized business alliance between the two firms, RateWare XL – which is designed to deliver less-than-truckload, density and linear rates via software-as-a-service (SaaS) – will interface to mileage data from ALK’s PC Miler product.
“This seamless interface provides customers the ability to increase the speed and efficiency of these applications as well,” says Craig Fiander, vice president of marketing for PC Miler solutions. “It ensures customers are always ‘current’ with automatic map data and truck-specific routing updates. This interface simplifies the experience of doing business with both ALK and SMC3.”
Patterson says that in the past, the process of combining ALK and SMC3 content for his company’s customers was somewhat time-consuming. “Now, as long as the SMC3 customer is a licensed ALK customer, SMC3 will access the mileage data they need and, based on the mileage, use our rating engine to quickly determine the rates,” he says. “SMC3 ’s investments in Web delivery – and our understanding of how people use our data in a mission-critical operations environment – have helped us to optimize and maximize the speed of our data delivery. Customers will get their results very quickly via our redundant optimized network.”
The new interface also will allow software developers to write one Web service to SMC3, using one protocol and one high set of security standards vs. approaching ALK and SMC3 separately, alleviating programming time and effort. “All they need to do now is ask us a question, and we give them the answer,” Patterson says. “It’s a seamless response. This is the next step in our long relationship with ALK. It’s a good solution for our customers, both from the perspective of developer integration costs and time, but also for their ease of use and the speed of integration – all of which will help the customers’ bottom line.”
