Strengthening Fraud Prevention with Automated Carrier Onboarding
As a rapidly growing logistics and specialty transportation provider, Pennsylvania-based Bridgeway needed an effective and scalable solution for carrier vetting and onboarding to protect customers’ freight from the increasing threat of fraud. Bridgeway turned to Descartes MyCarrierPortal™ integrated with Descartes MacroPoint™ for shipment visibility to streamline processes across 15+ freight agent brands. The combined solution helped Bridgeway simplify workflows to increase carrier onboarding efficiency and productivity, identify fraud schemes, improve tracking compliance, and enhance agent and carrier relationships.
The Challenge: Unifying Vetting Across Complex Logistics Network
With multiple brokerage acquisitions and a proprietary transportation management system (TMS), Bridgeway faced the challenge of standardizing carrier onboarding and compliance processes across different systems and workflows. Each brand had its own manual methods—spreadsheets, emails, disparate portals—to check carrier insurance, authority, and safety data. With 100,000+ trucks, 500,000+ shipments annually, and rising exposure to carrier fraud and identity theft, the company’s time-consuming manual insurance verification and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) monitoring process was no longer sustainable and left Bridgeway vulnerable to fraud.
In addition to saving us an enormous amount of time and effort vetting insurance, the Descartes solution catches nuances and data discrepancies that would have otherwise slipped through our manual practices, like when a carrier mistakenly files intra-state vs. inter-state DOT authority. This level of automated compliance speeds up onboarding while preventing fraud across our transportation operations.
With more than 50 years’ experience, Bridgeway is one of North America’s largest specialty transportation providers, solving the toughest transport problems for critical industries—oversized, energy, government, manufacturing, construction, consumer goods, international—with its extensive network of motor carriers, brokerages, and specialized assets.
The Solution: Automation Drives Productivity & Security
From regional brands to Fortune 500s, shippers rely on Bridgeway to haul everything from wind turbines and military cargo to delicate consumer goods and industrial materials. Managing 15+ brands under the Bridgeway umbrella, the company consolidated and automated its manual insurance and authority verification process using Descartes MyCarrierPortal, integrated with tracking and risk data from Descartes MacroPoint, to drive faster onboarding, greater operational transparency, and a more secure, data-driven carrier network—while giving its agents confidence in every load they book.
“Insurance validation tends to be one of the main reasons that a carrier isn’t cleared. On our end, the tedious task of insurance vetting was our biggest time sink,” said Holly Phillips, Compliance Manager at Bridgeway. “It quickly became apparent that manual vetting was simply not feasible at the scale we required.”
“With Descartes’ intuitive user interface, we can look information up on the fly, quickly assess categories (e.g., “acceptable,” “needs review”), and automatically validate FMCSA data, including detection of mismatched or invalid Department of Transportation (DOT) and Motor Carrier (MC) authority filings.”
To enhance fraud detection, the solution tracks FMCSA contact changes, flags suspicious updates, integrates customized risk assessments within Bridgeway’s TMS, and monitors carrier tracking behavior to spot activity like stolen credential use.
Descartes provides the transparency to easily assess risk and make the right decision. If I have a suspicion that a carrier might be double brokering and I see that they don’t have any tracking data or that their tracking percentage is really tiny, I’m less likely to make a concession.
“In addition to sophisticated risk mitigation, ease of use, and cost efficiency, we selected the Descartes solution because we wanted a vendor that we could build a collaborative relationship with. Together, we created APIs to integrate our proprietary systems for transportation management, carrier monitoring, and onboarding and ensure we had everything in one place,” said Phillips. “Both the IT and executive leadership teams are happy, which is a huge bonus.”
The Results
- Increased Efficiency & Scalability: Bridgeway streamlined carrier onboarding and documentation across all brands with Descartes MyCarrierPortal’s automated insurance verification and FMCSA monitoring.
- Fraud Prevention: Automated FMCSA monitoring flags data inconsistencies to spot fraud, while integrated tracking helps Bridgeway prevent identity theft, double brokering, and financial risk.
- Enhanced Agent & Carrier Relationships: Risk data flows into Bridgeway’s TMS, giving agents instant carrier visibility and faster access to trusted partners. Automated insurance vetting streamlines onboarding, reducing friction and enhancing Bridgeway’s reputation.
- Streamlined Collaboration & Support: Bridgeway met implementation deadlines by partnering with Descartes to build APIs that integrated its TMS, onboarding, and carrier monitoring systems, tailoring the solution to its specific needs.
