How to Automate SMC3

LTL runs on numbers everyone has agreed to trust

SMC3 is not software a driver ever opens. It is the pricing and transit data underneath a large share of the less-than-truckload freight moving in North America, sold to shippers, carriers, logistics service providers and the technology vendors who build for all three.

LTL pricing is genuinely complicated, and that complication is why the company exists, ninety years in. What a pallet costs depends on its freight class, its density, the origin and destination points, the carrier's own tariff, a discount negotiated off a base, and accessorial charges for anything out of the ordinary. Two carriers quoting the same pallet can differ for reasons that have nothing to do with service.

So the market runs on shared reference points. CzarLite is the carrier-neutral base rate a great many pricing agreements are written against. RateWare XL turns a shipment into a number. CarrierConnect XL says how long the carrier should take.

Pricing a pallet takes seconds, the rest takes all week

Quoting is the quick part of an LTL shipment. Everything after it is done by hand.

A customer wants to know where a pallet is, which means opening the carrier's tracking page and typing in the pro number. Billing needs the delivery receipt before it can invoice, which means finding the signed copy in the carrier's imaging system, one shipment at a time, across eight carrier sites with eight different logins. A claim goes in for a crushed pallet and then sits, because the only place its status ever changes is the carrier's claims portal, and nobody gets told when it does.

Then the freight bills arrive carrying lines nobody quoted: a reclassification, a residential delivery, a liftgate, a redelivery. Checking one against what the shipment was rated at takes ten minutes, so most companies check a sample, and plenty check none.

SMC3

Freight bills matched to the rated amount Every invoice line set against what the shipment was rated at, so a reclassification or an unagreed accessorial is disputed inside the carrier's window.

Delivery receipts pulled, not requested Signed copies retrieved from each carrier's own imaging system and attached to the invoice, so billing stops waiting on a carrier service desk.

Transit performance measured lane by lane Actual delivery days compared with the published transit time by carrier and lane, so the next bid is argued from your own record.

CarrierConnect XL predicts transit, it cannot follow a pro number

What SMC3 supplies is dense, and it is worth using properly before adding anything around it.

RateWare XL rates class and density shipments through an engine built on industry bases and reached over RESTful APIs, so a quoting screen or a TMS gets the same answer every time. RateWare Plus adds carrier contract management in one interface, with the carrier-published accessorial charges that otherwise live in a folder of PDFs. CarrierConnect XL compiles transit times and carrier service detail from hundreds of national, super-regional and regional carriers across North America, including their points of service and terminal locations. Bid$ense runs the LTL bid itself, folding pricing, claims ratios, on-time performance and transit times into how a procurement event gets analysed.

Read the list and the pattern is plain: all of it describes what a shipment should cost and how long it should take. It is planning data, and it is deliberately carrier-neutral.

What no reference dataset can tell you is what happened to the pallet that went out on Tuesday. That is a live fact, and it lives on the carrier's own website, next to the delivery receipt, the claim status and the invoice. Every carrier publishes it differently.

Freight bills checked against the rate they were quoted

The carriers publish what actually happened. The only missing step is somebody reading it against what was planned, on every shipment rather than on the ones that go wrong.

Every freight bill compared line by line against what the shipment was rated at, so a reclassification or an accessorial nobody agreed to arrives as a dispute list with the numbers attached, inside the window the carrier allows. Delivery receipts pulled out of each carrier's imaging system and attached to the invoice, so billing stops waiting. Open claims checked on the carriers' claims portals each week, so a request for more paperwork is answered in days rather than found a month later.

The measurement half is just as useful. Actual transit set against the published transit time, by carrier and by lane, over a quarter, so the next bid is argued from your own record rather than a carrier's marketing. Service alerts and embargo notices read off carrier sites, so a terminal closure becomes a planning input instead of a surprise.

Keep the boundary where money and relationships are. Reading portals, matching numbers and drafting a dispute can run overnight. Filing that dispute, tendering a load, or telling a customer their pallet is late belongs to a person.

Auditing a freight bill is repetitive, not difficult

Nobody needs a rating expert to notice that an invoice charges for a liftgate on a dock-to-dock shipment. It just needs doing, on every bill, in a week with four hundred of them.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the carrier's tracking page, its imaging system, its claims portal or your own rating and accounting screens, reads what is on each, and writes the comparison into the sheet your team already works from.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a run can be watched and stopped part way. Anything that files a dispute or goes to a customer is drafted and waits for approval.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.