Coyote Logistics’s Software Moves Trucks of Heineken for Less

When Heineken wanted a new company to haul its brew in the U.S. last year, it hired a Chicago upstart that didn’t own a single tractor-trailer. What Coyote Logistics offered instead was the undivided attention of founder Jeff Silver, a 48-year-old trucking industry veteran who promised to get the beer from ports to distribution centers less expensively than the competition would. Although the Dutch brewer was his biggest client yet, Silver was confident he could deliver. “It’s really as simple as doing what you say you are going to,” he says.

Today the beermaker’s shipments are among 1,850 tractor-trailer loads that Coyote schedules each day. The 720-employee company, founded in 2006, uses software to match shipments with a network of 19,000 contracted carriers. Silver, who holds a master’s in logistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed the system with fellow MIT graduate and Chief Strategy Officer Chris Pickett. In addition to arranging pickups and deliveries, the software also handles the complexity of setting rates offered to truckers, which fluctuate according to how many carriers are available, the distance to be traveled, the size and type of cargo, and other conditions. The automation lets Silver divide his workforce into two groups -- one that finds and logs shipments and another that locates truckers. As a result, Coyote arranges for 15 to 20 truckloads a day per worker, instead of the more typical six to eight loads found in most logistics companies, where one person handles an entire transaction, says Evan Armstrong, president of Stoughton (Wisc.)-based Armstrong & Associates, a supply-chain research-and-consulting firm.