New Age Logistics Scales Auto Transport 15X with Reform

New Age Logistics is a premier third-party logistics provider and the brokerage arm of the Evans Network of Companies. Founded in 1989, New Age coordinates freight across drayage, auto transport, truckload, and less-than-truckload services. Its network of more than 20,000 carriers gives shippers options across routes, timing, and price, while its Evans membership extends access to intermodal, flatbed, and dry van services.

“Reform handles order entry across our systems, so our team can keep up as auto transport grows. Without it, we would have needed to add headcount to grow this quickly.” — Paul Kennedy, Director of Operations at New Age Logistics

The Challenge: Manual Order Entry Bottlenecked Auto Transport Growth

New Age Logistics was expanding auto transport alongside its established drayage and truckload operations. The new vertical ran on thinner margins, and new orders quickly outpaced what the team could handle.

“The same order needed to move through different systems depending on the customer, the mode, and how the freight was being handled,” explains Paul Kennedy, Director of Operations. “Those systems all serve a purpose, but they were not necessarily built to work together.”

His team served as that connection, moving data by hand. In drayage, which moves containers from ports or rail terminals to customers, that meant retyping the same information before the order could be booked. Paul’s team read shipment details, reference numbers, and rates from a PDF, entered them into a transportation management system (TMS), then saved and attached the source document. The attachment step alone took about two minutes per work order, adding close to 80 minutes for a 40-order batch.

In the auto transport business, every increase in volume brought more manual entry. For a PDF listing 30 vehicles, Paul’s team created 30 individual orders in one system, then entered them again in another. “Auto moves are a high-volume, thinner-margin business,” he says. “We would have needed to hire just to keep up with entering the orders into the different systems.” At the volume New Age wanted to run, those costs went against a margin that could not absorb them.

Paul had spent five years at an industry startup focused on drayage, where he’d seen firsthand what process automation could do for freight companies. He evaluated several vendors, but needed a solution that could follow New Age’s procedures, accommodate different freight modes, and work across the systems already in place.

Paul chose Reform because he and his operators could shape the workflows around how they actually handled freight, with Reform’s team helping configure automations around those steps.

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The Solution: Configurable Automations for Faster Order Entry Across Systems

Paul and his team began with drayage work-order entry. During onboarding, New Age’s operators explained how they transferred information from customer PDFs into the TMS, and Reform’s team connected the workflow to that existing system. The first Automation was working within a couple of days.

Now, when drayage orders come in, Reform extracts shipment details, reference numbers, and prices, creates the TMS record, and attaches the source PDF. Paul’s team applied Reform’s Automations on both ends of the process. On the front end, Reform pulls orders directly out of incoming email and creates the work order with the relevant freight charges. On the back end, it handles the billing documents and interchanges that used to be filed by hand.

Next, the auto transport team configured its two-system workflow with Reform. The team submits a work-order PDF, and Reform extracts the vehicle and order details. It creates orders through the Super Dispatch application programming interface (API) and enters matching records in the second operational system. A 30-vehicle work order that once required 60 manual entries now moves through in a couple of minutes. 

“It’s taking one source of information and making multiple systems work together around the way we operate,” Paul says.

Across both businesses, Paul’s team configures Reform to auto-approve work orders based on certain rules and select customers. Established customers move through automatically, while new customer documents are flagged for manual review before moving downstream. That exception handling gives the team rule-based control over the orders entering their systems. The team has started applying this control to truckload, automating order entry for select customers as that side of the business grows.

Paul’s team stays just as hands-on when it comes to refining Automations. When an unfamiliar document format causes a workflow to fail, the team works with Reform to quickly adjust the workflow. “The self-service nature of it is a great thing,” Paul explains. New Age account managers are learning to configure their own Automations, and one is even teaching the team new ways to automate tasks as needs come up.

Across drayage, auto, and truckload, Reform now handles the order entry and document work that used to sit between systems, freeing account managers to spend more time with customers.

“My team has been part of the actual building. I give them the equation: these are the pieces of the puzzle. My team provides the individual steps, and Reform turns them into AI agents and dashboards.”

The Results: Automated Order Entry Drives $30K–$40K in Monthly Gross Profit

With Reform, New Age scaled its auto transport business without scaling its existing team. The hours once spent entering orders across systems now go toward higher-value customer work and new growth opportunities.

• $30K–$40K in monthly auto transport gross profit
• 15X monthly auto transport volume in about one year
• 75% less time on auto work order entry
• 50% less time on drayage work order entry

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Paul is already exploring the next set of Automations at New Age. He’s identified trucker assignment, email dispatch, reporting, truckload posting, and spreadsheet workflows as the next steps, which he expects will save hours each week.

“If a process is repeated at any level, there is probably an opportunity to automate part of it. With Reform, we can start with how we want the operation to work and then build toward it.”