Logistics
StartupLogistics platform Pallet accelerates growth with Stedi
Pallet offers an integrated transportation management system (TMS) and warehouse management system (WMS) that helps companies manage their entire supply chain from end to end. It uses EDI, APIs, and automatic PDF reading to replace data entry and manual processing. Pallet’s customers are logistics companies that use Pallet as a system of record when working with larger logistics partners.
Challenge
As a fast-growing company, Pallet needed to quickly develop EDI integrations with major shippers, carriers, and logistics companies. They didn’t want to spend weeks or months onboarding a single trading partner, as is often the case with existing EDI solutions. They wanted to add new trading partners in days.
Pallet also needed complete control over their EDI system to rapidly resolve errors that arise once an integration is live, since many trading partners have a 30-minute SLA for Pallet’s customers to accept a load tender request.
Finally, Pallet needed a solution with competitive, predictable pricing that worked with the unit economics of their business. Many existing EDI solutions have pricing models that are incompatible with SaaS businesses due to per-partner onboarding and recurring fees, along with per-transaction and data processing fees.
Solution
Pallet built EDI capabilities into their TMS platform using Stedi, and now they can add new trading partners in just a few business days.
Pallet uses Stedi’s self-service interface to manage all of its partner-facing EDI, including setup, connectivity, file processing, and error management. Stedi sends webhooks for processing errors and other events to Slack, so Pallet’s operations team can efficiently triage, diagnose, and fix issues.
For the integration with their backend systems, Stedi sends webhooks directly to Pallet’s API, and Pallet sends webhooks directly to Stedi’s API. Pallet uses Stedi’s mapping tool to transform Stedi's JSON format to and from Pallet’s native API shape, eliminating the need for middleware.
Andrew Spencer, Pallet’s co-founder, explains why Stedi emerged as their top choice: "Stedi is incredibly knowledgeable about the EDI space, and the onboarding team was very responsive. Beyond that, the platform's competitive pricing and plug-and-play functionality make it a natural fit for our needs."
Results
Since adopting Stedi, Pallet has reduced partner onboarding time from weeks to 2-3 days, and EDI ticket resolution is down from an average of 4-5 hours to 20-30 minutes. With Stedi’s flat-rate pricing, Pallet is also able to easily forecast costs as growth accelerates.
Spencer says Stedi has been a game-changer for Pallet. "Stedi completely removed EDI as a bottleneck to our growth. In fact, the speed with which we can support new integrations has now become a competitive advantage.”
