Leveraging a Strong LTL Foundation to Achieve Peak Performance: TA Services & SMC³

As TA Services expanded its managed transportation and consolidated freight offerings, the team encountered a familiar scaling problem: The LTL operations that worked at one size began to strain at the next. Rating and routing had grown increasingly complex. Visibility gaps crept in. Interlining risk became harder to manage. And the shipper experience was getting harder to keep consistent.

“Our goal was to utilize technology that creates a seamless, people-first experience for our customers while giving our teams the information, precision and reliability needed to deliver peak performance every day,” said Mike Teresinski, Executive Vice President, Operations, Managed Transportation & Cross Border at TA Services.

TA needed an enterprise-grade LTL solution that could streamline rating and routing, eliminate interlining risk, strengthen transit accuracy and integrate cleanly into existing systems. The team turned to SMC³.

Unified solutions and robust LTL intelligence to build on

SMC³ has served as the industry’s central hub for LTL technology and data, providing authoritative rating, transit and service intelligence to carriers, shippers and third-party logistics providers across North America for more than nine decades. That breadth of expertise gave TA a stable, well-supported partner with a trusted technology solution platform to build on.

Through close collaboration, the two teams integrated SMC³’s high-performance APIs directly into TA’s operational workflows, giving planning, pricing and analytics teams an accurate single source of truth for rating, routing and network performance.

Three key products anchor the partnership:

• RateWare® XL— SMC³’s LTL rating engine. It consolidates complex rating logic across class-based and density-based tariffs, enabling TA to return fast, precise quotes at scale. The result is fewer rebills and more accurate pricing upfront.
• CarrierConnect® XL — A transit and service-point database sourced directly from more than 300 carriers. TA uses it to avoid interlining risk, close visibility gaps and set accurate delivery expectations based on direct-service networks.
• CzarLite®— North America’s most widely adopted neutral base rate. It allows TA to compare carriers on a consistent basis and execute transparent pricing strategies.

The integration runs on SMC³’s SOC 2-certified infrastructure with U.S.-based support.

“We are proud to be part of the backbone that helps keep LTL moving for TA Services,” said Brian Thompson, Chief Commercial Officer at SMC³. “SMC³’s goal is to make the hard work disappear for customers so TA can focus on delivering results.”

A solid partnership that operates daily, not quarterly

Technology alone doesn’t explain why the integration has held up under growth. The two teams operate on a daily consultative rhythm. SMC³ collaborates directly with TA’s operations and pricing teams, providing technical support within minutes when needed and assisting in the ongoing optimization of workflows. The relationship functions less like a vendor contract and more like an embedded extension of TA’s own team.

That closeness is rooted in cultural alignment. TA’s core values — People First, Service, Safety, Results, Innovation — map naturally onto SMC³’s focus on security, reliability and performance. Both organizations prioritize execution over aspiration, and both treat long-term customer success as the measurement that matters. When the values match, problem-solving accelerates and trust compounds.

Measurable gains and performance across the portfolio

By standardizing rating, routing and transit intelligence on a unified platform, TA achieved the accuracy and responsiveness needed to support customer expectations at scale. Key outcomes include a 30% reduction in transportation costs from a major network redesign, 8.3% portfolio savings through optimized rating and carrier selection and lane-level savings of up to 25% in specific corridors. Routing accuracy across managed transportation now stands at 99%, with consolidated, multimodal shipments at 90-95%.

Those numbers have meant fewer re-rates and rebills, more predictable delivery experiences and fewer exceptions in consolidation networks.

“The SMC³ partnership and solutions are foundational to our LTL success, keeping the complexities of LTL out of view so that our teams and our customers can stay focused on results,” said Catherine Mallery, LTL Pricing Manager at TA Services.

What customers are seeing

TA gathered feedback from customers experiencing the improvements firsthand. Faster quoting, more consistent transit times and improved visibility across shipments have changed the day-to-day experience for shippers relying on TA’s network.

“TA Services has proven to be an exceptional partner for us,” said a Senior Manager of Global Supply Chain at a major golf retailer. “Their ability to optimize logistics and deliver customized visibility tools has driven meaningful improvements across our supply chain.”

Partnership momentum through innovation 

Both organizations plan to deepen the partnership by expanding API integrations, advancing real-time visibility and modernizing critical touchpoints in dispatch, documentation and data retrieval. As TA grows its customer base and service offerings, the SMC³ platform underneath will need to keep pace. SMC³’s continuous investment in technology and performance suggest it can!