What Took Place On The 60-Minute TMS

Last week we ran a webinar called The 60-Minute TMS. The idea was for Graham to sign up to Ship Angel from scratch and try to get all the way through a full implementation cycle before the hour was out. No deck. No pre-built account. Just the platform.

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Here’s a recap of what took place.

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The Argument Before The Keyboard

Before he touched the platform, Graham spent a few minutes laying out why he wanted to do this.

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The TMS industry has quietly agreed that implementations should take 6 to 12 months. Years for the bigger rollouts. Quarters at best. He doesn’t think that holds up anymore.

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Graham’s been in supply chain software for 26 years. Five years ago, going live in 12 weeks and 6 days was the fastest implementation he’d ever shipped. It was a record at the time. He’d be embarrassed to quote that number now.

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His take: in the AI era, the old math doesn’t apply. Software is being shipped faster than ever. Forward-deployed engineers can stand a platform up alongside a customer. Configuration that used to live in a year-long consulting engagement now happens at runtime.

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Years isn’t right. Quarters isn’t right. Even months should be reserved for full global rollouts, not a team going live on a TMS.

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Days and weeks. That’s where he thinks the bar should be.

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The Signup

Graham created a new Ship Angel account live on the call. Name, email, password, verification code, company, top carrier, rate sheet upload. Inside the platform, with a working workspace.

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Nothing pre-loaded.

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The Rate Sheet

This was the first thing he wanted to show.

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Most shippers we talk to are spending 5 to 15 hours a week on rate sheets. PDFs. Word docs. Excel. A different format from every carrier. Surcharges have grown 4 to 5x since 2020. It adds up to a real chunk of someone’s working week.

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Graham uploaded a carrier rate sheet, the messy multi-tab, abbreviation-heavy kind, and Maddy (our AI) parsed it. Every rate, every surcharge. Searchable, in one place.

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He compared it to how most legacy TMS systems handle this. They hand you a spreadsheet template and ask you to standardize the rates yourself.

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Spot Procurement

Post-COVID, contract-versus-spot ratios moved. The old 90/10 split is now closer to 60/40 or 70/30. Spot rates matter more, and most teams are still procuring them by sending out a round of emails and stitching the replies back together.

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Graham showed the spot flow. Submit once. Quote goes out to multiple vendors at the same time. Replies come back inside the same view. Winning bid is awarded, and the rate flows into the management system.

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A question came in during this part: have we seen real ROI on the spot workflow?

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Yes. One Fortune 100 customer has seen five-figure savings on spot in their first six weeks on the platform.

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The Invoice Audit

This was the moment most attendees messaged me about afterwards.

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Graham loaded three brand new invoices into Ship Angel. The same AI that reads rate sheets reads invoices. It compared each line against the contracted rate, called out any deltas, and surfaced discrepancies.

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One invoice showed a $428 overcharge on the emergency bunker surcharge. The same invoice showed a $408 delta on peak season. Total catch on that one invoice: $769.

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The Booking Flow

Last stop on the demo. Graham moved into one of our internal test environments to walk through what booking looks like once a customer is up and running.

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He picked a lane (Shanghai to New York), pulled in Maddy for context on it (congestion at destination, weather warnings, carrier holiday calendars, MQC consumption to date), and pushed to book. From there he walked through the rest of the booking lifecycle. Booking confirmed. SI submitted. BOL accepted. Exceptions surfaced.

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Wrapping Up

Graham closed by going back to the argument he opened with.

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Years, quarters, months. None of those numbers are technical limits. They’re inherited expectations from a software era that doesn’t exist anymore.

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The thing he wanted people to take away: implementations don’t have to take half a year. The tools to make them shorter already exist.

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If you missed the webinar live and want the full hour, here it is.

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Watch the full webinar →