Novari
The 80% Your TMS Doesn’t Touch: Counterparty Execution

A shipper waiting on a carrier, a 3PL attempting to reach an owner-operator or a purchasing team chasing a supplier’s ship date all rely on the other party to confirm its commitments, often by email, phone, or text. Most counterparties have no system to integrate into, so execution is done manually, and even with a TMS, a coordinator typically handles 15 to 20 loads a day.

Novari addresses that gap through Counterparty Execution. With Novari, coordinators have handled around 100, depending on the operation, because 80% of their job was follow-up a TMS doesn’t touch. Its system captures commitments and responses from existing channels and brings them into a workflow customers can track and manage.

Novari sends each commitment request and watches for confirmation, objection or silence, systematically interpreting responses and following up on exceptions. The aim is for a delayed load or failed appointment to surface in the company’s system before a customer or production line reveals it.

“If you spend your day chasing another company, you’re doing Counterparty Execution manually,” says Perry Joiner, founder and CEO. “We give customers the ability to focus on the things that matter the most. Our line is, ‘Your best people on your hardest problems.’”

Moving the System Boundary

Integration with systems of record assumes the counterparty has a system too, which holds for large companies but not the long tail, where the manual work happens: 91.5% of U.S. motor carriers operate 10 or fewer trucks, according to the American Trucking Associations, and 74% of U.S. manufacturers employ fewer than 20 people, according to the Census Bureau.

Novari’s system runs the routine, which changes the nature of the work: customer teams focus on decisions requiring judgment, authority, and relationships. Counterparties know when they are interacting with the system versus when they are working with someone on the Novari Desk, which is priced on labor and coverage rather than freight spend. Novari never takes freight margin or holds carrier relationships and acts only for the party that hired it.

Taking Direct Control of Freight

For Novari customers, the Novari system can run as a system of record or an overlay on what they already use, handling follow-up with counterparties that run on a phone and a mailbox. Routing guides, escalation timing, invoice tolerances and exception handling are configured for each customer during a brief setup, without custom development, so execution follows company policy rather than drifting, as manual counterparty work does.

Novari is not a 3PL and does not move freight. It recognizes brokers’ value for surge capacity, spot freight and infrequent modes, while shippers decide lane by lane what to manage directly. Carrier relationships sourced through Novari remain with customers, with contracts and rates in their names.

One shipper applied Novari’s technology and Desk to its existing contract rates and carrier relationships, generating annual freight savings well into six figures without changing either. Novari has also helped a customer move its existing carriers to net 30 terms while deploying freight audit without additional staff, generating $1 million in working-capital benefit.

Visibility Into Why Costs Change

Every exchange is retained, so customers can answer questions about any order: what happened when, who was involved and why. Novari can reveal repeated tender declines, failed appointments or unexpected accessorials, giving managers context to renegotiate a lane, replace a carrier or dispute a charge. Exception tracking shows whether company policy is working, and policy changes take effect without retraining or chasing compliance.

Novari’s diagnostic approach also looks for how an operation compensates for unreliable execution, from expedited freight to the person everyone calls when something breaks, and puts a cost on each that finance can verify.

Freight is where Novari is proving the model, not the boundary of it; the same commitment loop can extend to purchase-order acknowledgments and inbound freight.

For shippers and 3PLs today, and purchasing teams next, Novari holds every commitment to the same standard: confirmed, not assumed.