The tender nobody saw.
One of the largest shipper accounts LIVE ran deactivated it in 2025. Nothing was wrong with the freight. The answer to a tender arrived 19 minutes after the window closed.
What happened
LIVE's tenders passed through three systems before they reached a person: an EDI gateway and two different TMS platforms. The only signal that a tender had arrived was an email alert. In February 2025 those alerts stopped coming.
The customer gave carriers one hour to accept or decline. One load looked like this:
| Time | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1:14 PM | Tender sent by the shipper |
| 2:14 PM | The shipper's one-hour window closes |
| 2:33 PM | Our 990 accept goes out: 79 minutes after the tender, 19 minutes after the window closed |
What we did
A recovery plan went in, including a 30-minute auto-decline so that no tender could sit unanswered. By late May the customer had moved to other carriers. They said they had heard "we'll fix EDI" too many times for it to mean anything.
What it taught us
- One email alert is not a signal. A system that tells you about a tender once, by email, will one day stop telling you.
- A late answer is a no. The shipper moved on at 2:14. The 990 at 2:33 changed nothing except the record.
- A person has to see every tender. Not an inbox. A person, with a clock.
What FlowLine does now
By the numbers
Questions
What is an EDI 990?
The 990 is the Response to a Load Tender: Accept or Decline, sent back to the shipper for a specific 204.
How long do shippers give to answer a tender?
It varies from 15 minutes to a couple of hours. In this case it was one hour.
What is an auto-decline?
A rule that declines any tender still open at its deadline, so the shipper receives an answer instead of silence.
Walk me through your last missed tender. Twenty minutes. No pitch deck.
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