In a world where consumers can track pizza deliveries in real time, it’s staggering that global freight—worth trillions of dollars—still runs on email chains, static spreadsheets, and PDF attachments. Yet for many shippers, that’s still the reality.
Despite major advances in transportation management systems (TMS), APIs, and cloud-native logistics software, multimodal freight booking—especially across ocean, air, and road—remains fragmented, slow, and full of blind spots. And while the logistics industry has long been considered slow to digitize, that’s no longer the root issue. The problem now is not the absence of technology, but its uneven application.
Whether you're managing container loads from Asia, arranging urgent air shipments into Europe, or coordinating regional road freight, one thing is consistent: manual workflows create daily friction for shipping teams.
The impact shows up in multiple ways:
Taken together, these issues do more than increase cost and lead time. They reduce a shipper’s ability to respond to changing conditions, which is increasingly risky in today’s volatile and time-sensitive freight environment.
The infrastructure for real-time, API-based freight booking is no longer a future ambition. It is available now and expanding quickly.
Last-mile, especially CEP (courier express and parcel) carriers, have been leading the game and have launched APIs as early as 20+ years ago. E.g., UPS launched early XML/SOAP-based APIs for rating & tracking.
In recent years, perhaps the technologically least advanced transport modalities have also digitally evolved rapidly. Top ocean carriers have launched DCSA-compliant REST APIs for schedule access, capacity availability, and booking confirmation. These endpoints allow external systems, such as transportation management platforms, to automate bookings and track changes with consistency and speed.
Air cargo is also evolving. Platforms now offer APIs for eAWB tracking, enabling integration across multiple airlines for near real-time shipment visibility.
In road freight, particularly across North America and Europe, in addition to carriers’ own interfaces, digital freight networks now provide APIs for dynamic pricing and capacity matching. This allows shippers to evaluate options programmatically rather than manually.
For the first time, multimodal logistics is starting to function as a connected digital network instead of a sequence of disconnected phone calls and email threads.
Just because a carrier has an API doesn’t mean your system connects to it.
Most TMS, multi-carrier collaboration, or shipping/delivery management platforms support only a subset of carriers. Even then, integration isn't plug-and-play. APIs vary in schema, security, and documentation quality. If the carrier you rely on doesn’t already have a prebuilt integration, you're left with two options:
And what if a key partner—say, a regional NVOCC or airfreight handler—still relies entirely on EDI or CSV uploads? Then you’re stuck.
As we discussed above, having the technology is not the same as having it connected. Many carriers now offer APIs, but most shippers still rely on emails, portals, or EDI to manage freight bookings. The reason is simple: real-time integration doesn’t happen automatically.
Technology has come a long way, but not every partner in the freight chain moves at the same pace. Many carriers still operate on legacy systems, and most transportation management systems (TMS) do not support all available APIs by default. This creates a disconnect, especially for shippers who are ready to automate but find themselves limited by what their carriers or platforms can support.
In addition, contrary to other legacy forms of system integrations (e.g., EDI), APIs are often less standardized. By default, they reflect more the Logistics service providers' in-house processes and system logic than any industry standard, and standards for API messaging are only slowly emerging, and above all, vary across regions, transport modality, etc. Even when logistics service providers’ APIs might seemingly follow similar structures, their processes and capabilities (e.g., webhook/subscription management vs. only pull functionality) vary greatly. Furthermore, many LSPs have different code lists, i.e., for some LSP a shipping location is indicated using a standard code such as UN/LOCODE, other could use a combination of postal code, city, country code (often in own, unstructured formats), longitude and lagitude, IATA 3-letter airport code, or simply free text.
This is exactly the kind of gap that data connectivity solutions like coneksion® are designed to bridge.
Instead of requiring you to custom-build integrations for every carrier, coneksion® acts as a data connectivity layer between your internal systems (TMS or similar) and the external freight world. It converts EDI-based messages into modern REST APIs and vice versa, ensuring that both sides of the connection can communicate without needing to overhaul their tech stack.
Beyond harmonization, coneksion® cleans and enriches your shipment data if needed before it ever reaches your TMS, reducing errors and improving reliability. Regardless of whether a carrier offers a modern API or still uses a decades-old format, you receive data through a single, consistent interface. However, coneksion® refrains from taking the cleaning activities too far (which is a typical pitfall in many other logtech applications) and also shares, in addition to the harmonized information (e.g. event status code) the original data from the LSP if requested.
Even better, the service includes onboarding support, format maintenance, and real-time error handling, all delivered as a turnkey solution. What would normally require a lengthy IT project becomes a manageable service layer that simply plugs into your freight operations in the form of a managed plug-in that unlocks the full potential of your TMS.
In short, coneksion® makes real-time freight integration possible, even when the ecosystem around you isn’t fully digital.
Let’s imagine a mid-sized shipper coordinating ocean containers from China, replenishing goods via air from Europe, and distributing them domestically through road and CEP carriers.
With real-time API booking integrated:
Compare this to emailing three separate ops teams, manually uploading order files, and calling a dispatcher when something seems late.
Especially during the Corona pandemic and other recent global supply chain disruptions, real-time in-transit visibility has become a very hot topic, and most of the largest logistics service providers, and especially their customers, have invested in it. However, real-time visibility is only valuable if it offers actionable insights; no one needs maps with thousands of blinking spots, but rather wants to be notified about things as early as possible when it matters. Furthermore, telematics, IOT, satellite, etc., based RTTV only works for FTL/FCL shipments, but the absolute majority of shipments in numbers are LCL/LTL, Groupage and parcel shipments, for which scanning-milestone-based tracking is much more suitable. Another major challenge of real-time visibility has been the authorization of data. Who is authorized to see what? E.g. who decides who sees what, should only the party that bought the freight be able to see the shipment tracking details? We at coneksion are convinced that the best logistics and supply chain visibility starts with digital (booking/transport order) execution. When a shipper books electronically with a forwarder and the forwarder electronically with a carrier, a carrier can easily share any tracking information with the forwarder, who can add their internal tracking information (e.g., customs clearance status) and send full shipment tracking information back to the shipper, with each party’s references linked to each other. Shipment visibility as a “side-product” of electronic transport execution is not only much less complicated but also more cost-efficient.
In today's freight environment, speed and accuracy are no longer optional. They are essential for staying competitive, maintaining service levels, and protecting your bottom line.
Real-time freight integration is not just about saving time. It is about creating the resilience to respond faster when conditions shift. It gives your team the ability to reroute shipments before a delay escalates, to access alternate carriers when space is tight, and to track the true cost and performance of every shipment while it is still in motion.
But these benefits are only possible when shippers take control of their own data infrastructure. Success depends on more than technology alone. It requires the right connectivity, the right partnerships, and the ability to bridge digital gaps across your network.
APIs are already available. Major carriers are modernizing. Middleware solutions like Coneksion are making it possible to connect the dots, even when some partners still rely on legacy systems.
The next step is simple. If you are ready to reduce manual work, improve booking speed, and build a more agile logistics stack, schedule a discovery call with Coneksion. We will show you how to start where you are and grow into a real-time, resilient freight operation—mode by mode, lane by lane.
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