Why we're building a shared data layer for 3PL

There are roughly 73,000 independent third-party logistics businesses in the United States. Each one runs its own warehouse-management system, and almost all of them coordinate with partners the same way they did twenty years ago: email, phone, and fax.

Here's what a single order looks like today. A purchase order is emailed to a warehouse. Someone reads it and types it into their WMS by hand. A pick order is faxed back to the customer, who re-types it into their system. A paper bill of lading is generated, signed, scanned, and reconciled manually against the original. The same handful of facts — what, how much, where, when — gets re-keyed four or five times before the freight even moves.

Every re-key is slow, and every re-key is a chance to introduce an error that someone downstream has to catch.

Enterprise solved this. Independents got left out.

Large retailers solved data interchange decades ago with EDI. If you ship to a Target or a Home Depot, you're exchanging structured documents through providers like SPS Commerce or TrueCommerce. It works — but it's priced and engineered for enterprises. For an independent operator running two cold-storage facilities, traditional EDI is far too expensive and far too complex to adopt.

So the operators who would benefit most from clean data interchange are precisely the ones the existing tools ignore.

What we're building instead

Lading is a shared data layer for independent 3PL operators. The idea is simple: connect once with a partner, and from then on you exchange orders and bills of lading as structured data — not as PDFs stapled to emails.

When two locations are connected, an order isn't two drifting copies. It's one record both sides can see, with a shared status timeline and comments attached directly to it. The bill of lading is generated from that same record and pulled directly into the receiving partner's workflow.

Like EDI, but accessible. Like a marketplace, but for data exchange — not transactions.

Why a network, not just a tool

The value of clean data compounds with every partner you connect. A standalone tool helps one operator; a network helps the whole supply chain it sits in. That's why discovery and connection are first-class in Lading — you can search the network by location, storage type, and service, send a request, and start exchanging orders the moment it's accepted.

Once an order is accepted, it moves through the same lifecycle on both sides:

draft → pending → accepted → shipped → complete
                ↘ rejected     ↘ cancelled

Each transition is recorded on the order's activity timeline and visible to both partners in real time.

What's next

The MVP covers organizations, locations, partners, and the order lifecycle. Next on the roadmap is a REST API so that WMS and ERP vendors can read and write orders and bills of lading programmatically — closing the loop between the network and the systems operators already run.

If you operate a warehouse, broker freight, or produce product and you're tired of re-keying the same order all day, we'd love to have you. Get started — it's free.