Illinois-based Nussbaum Transportation (CCJ Top 250, No. 145) has demonstrated that solving internal challenges can create broader industry value.
As a pricing analyst then, Tyler Dietrich noticed a major, overwhelming challenge the carrier faced a few years ago: every shipper had a unique way of distributing their request for pricing.
“We’d participate in all these different bids, but each one of those shipper's bids looks different,” recalled Chris Aranda, chief commercial officer at Nussbaum.
The company kept scattered files and specific spreadsheets for each customer, processing bids manually in a time-consuming, disorganized workflow. Dietrich and the development team initially attempted to funnel everything into one master Excel file, but the solution quickly grew itself. By 2019, with proper coding and support, Dietrich and the development team created Sales Scope, a proprietary tool for the company’s bidding process.
“There was a huge leap,” Aranda said, describing the shift to a unified platform that not only processed bids but tracked ownership and integrated cost information, including importing market data from DAT Analytics to help with pricing decisions. The platform created workflow management, and team members saw “whose court is it in,” and critical information, including market pricing data, in one unified system.
There was a significant leap from the master spreadsheet to having a unified platform, the executives said. What once took hours now happened in minutes, allowing a single analyst to price approximately 1,100 lanes daily. It also helped eliminate email communication and ensured consistency in pricing and strategy across different departments.
Dustin Huber, director of business analytics, emphasized the impact.
“Half of the battle is just getting the data organized before you can even start pricing, and we have taken that process that used to take hours into really a few minutes,” Huber said.
In addition to speed, Aranda said Sales Scopes delivered three critical improvements: organization, visibility, and data intelligence. The platform saves years of bid data (information dating back to 2017), enabling team members to make decisions about network optimization based on historical input.
“We can go back to prior bids, and we can see what we bid on last year,” Huber said, adding that historical data helps identify opportunities when networks change or during negotiations with customers to show data-backed insights and projections.
The tool changed customer interactions. Aranda described using operational data during customer negotiations.
“He’s putting some pressure on us on this lane, but with [the] visibility [that we had with the platform] to the cost, how long the lane actually took to run, for example… I was able to talk to him about why this lane didn’t run in a day. It ran in a day and a half, and why I needed that extra revenue to cover that half day,” Aranda explained.
The platform’s insights enabled salespeople and other team members to provide customers with insights they didn’t have about their own networks.
“You’re talking to a knowledgeable salesperson that can literally walk you through the details of every single one of your lanes to the level that you may not even know how they operate,” Aranda said.
The platform also improved Nussbaum’s pricing culture, with regular review meetings where sales, pricing and operations team members align their strategies, while practicing accountability and consistency. The team also noted the benefit of being able to proactively reach out to customers with new pricing offers, backed by the consistency of its pricing tool.
When Nussbaum showcased their approach and earned CCJ’s Innovator of the Year in 2025, other carriers expressed interest, revealing an underserved market.
Rather than keeping Sales Scope as a competitive advantage, Nussbaum spun out Nussbaum Technology in September this year to take the product to market.
“We’re taking the process that’s really worked for us, and we’re helping other carriers with it, but we’re also getting feedback from other carriers,” Huber explained, noting that the collaborative approach will make the new product better over time.
Dietrich, who has now taken the role as president of Nussbaum Technology, said the revamped platform will “feel familiar with some additional new ideas."
