Old TV shows poked fun at automation — or at least the humans who attempted to work with it. Remember Lucy’s and Ethel’s short-lived stint wrapping chocolates as they came faster and faster on the automated manufacturing line?
But automation really is no laughing matter. It has changed our world, and the adoption of automation has become absolutely essential to profitably scale any type of business, whether that’s a candy factory or an LTL freight brokerage.
Automation Has Changed the Way We Do Business
Just seven years ago, the “future of automation” was uncertain, according to a 2018 Automation.com article titled “Automation Is Changing Everything.”
“The workforce could be expanded, productivity could skyrocket, and the price of goods could plummet. At the same time, jobs could be eliminated, industries disrupted, and political stability threatened,” it said.
As of yet, we have not seen the price of goods plummet, and automation doesn’t appear to be the world’s greatest threat to political stability. Is it too soon? Or does the pace of automation need to be slowed and done more methodically to avoid crippling industries and toppling governments?
“The answer is not to try to slow down technology. We need to race with the machine,” Iyad Rahwan, now the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, said.
Don’t Be Left Behind
A research paper titled "Automation: The Fourth Industrial Revolution" was posted on the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). As we’ve learned from history, industries must adopt new ways of doing business — or face extinction. And as in the past, human workers will still play a vital role.
“People skills (the ability to engage with people, determine and cater to their needs, deliberate and integrate their ideas) and thinking skills (the ability to problem solve, think strategically and navigate problems) will be valuable in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Low-skilled individuals performing routine tasks remain at high risk of being replaced by automation,” the research paper said.
LTL freight brokerage very much remains a people business, with human interaction a critical piece of profitable scalability. However, automation can help freight brokerages scale even faster by removing routine, time-consuming tasks from their lists of duties and allowing them to focus on strategically growing the business.
Implement Tools to Help You Profitably Scale
Drumkit has relied on freight brokers’ feedback to develop the most valuable tools to help them profitably scale their businesses.
Earlier this year, Drumkit helped a midsize freight brokerage:
- Define its automation priorities. The freight brokerage identified carrier sourcing as its biggest bottleneck, admitting it could take more than two hours per load.
- Rethink workflows and data. The brokerage realized its carrier database was scattered across three different systems.
- Understand team concerns. Ops reps were spending 60% of their time on manual email and SMS communication that could be automated.
- Monitor performance metrics. The load-to-book ratio was stuck at 15% due to slow response times.
- Scale what works best. The brokerages’ top performer had a system for carrier communication that others weren’t using.
“After implementing targeted automation based on their DRUMS analysis, they cut carrier sourcing time by 75% and improved their load-to-book ratio to 35%,” Drumkit CEO Dhruv Gupta said. “The key wasn’t just adopting automation — it was knowing exactly WHERE to apply it.”
Profitably Scale With Drumkit at Your Side
“When we first set out to build Drumkit, we had one simple question in mind: What if freight brokers didn’t have to live in their inbox?” Gupta wrote on LinkedIn. “We kept hearing the same story from brokers across the country: teams buried in routine emails, juggling quotes, booking loads, chasing updates. Most of it was the same every day. But it still ate up hours.
“At first, we thought the answer was speed — respond faster, quote faster, track faster. But the deeper we went, the more we realized: It’s not just about speed, it’s about headspace. Every email you don’t have to touch, every manual step you offload, it adds up.”
We built our freight broker software to take on those parts of the load life cycle that may seem small but steal a brokerage team’s time:
- Reading carrier capacity emails and logging truck availability.
- Quoting shipments instantly using Greenscreens, DAT, or your internal models.
- Scheduling appointments through portals or email threads.
- Handling routine tracking check-ins with carriers and customers.
- Even parsing BOLs and updating TMSes.
“We didn’t try to replace the broker. We tried to give them breathing room,” Gupta said. “And when we saw customers turn around and reallocate team members from offshore admin roles into revenue-driving ones, or just give their best people a little less chaos to deal with, we knew we were on the right track.”
Have you mapped out your automation priorities yet? If you’re in freight and want to hear what we’re learning, or share what’s working for you, book an introductory call.
