The company, based in Sammamish, Wash., also announced it has closed a Series A round of financing with angel investors from Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society and Atlas Accelerator. (.)
Enroute has been operating for just more than a year and is positioned across two hot trends -- software-as-a-service and corporate efforts to cut costs in a down economy.
The company's customer roster includes Theo Chocolate, Zumiez, iFloor, Cutter & Buck, and Renton Western Wear. Enroute manages some 750,000 packages.
Enroute offers a set of hosted business analytics applications that crunch a company's shipping data, analyze the logistics and associated costs, and return information on how to cut those costs by up to 20%, according to Enroute.
Users also can automate carrier selection, time and transit, and shipment quality. The service is aimed at companies that ship more than 1,000 packages per month and integrates with warehouse management software and line-of-business applications.
Enroute's entry level service is its Shipping Analytics Dashboard, a portal that delivers information on cost savings, but also aggregates a user's data over time to discover patterns for savings and efficiency.
Enroute's full service is its Transport Management Solution that supplies rate and transit time data across national and regional carriers and supplies labels and manifests. Users can choose regional or national carriers, delivery method, and various aspects of shipment quality.
The service is similar to transportation management software larger companies such as Wal-Mart use to control shipping costs. But such software, traditionally home-grown or purchased from the likes of Kewill, Logicor and Pitney Bowes, is prohibitively expensive for the smaller and mid-sized companies Enroute is targeting.
"Ten years ago a solution like this was not necessary," says Keith McCall, founder of Enroute. "Today, with a large shift in the way people buy products and the way retailers are going online there is need for more efficient systems to help them ship packages."
McCall says the business analytics Enroute delivers is a hallmark of the service.
"It's the ability to do deep-dive analysis on packages after they have shipped and apply that to the shipping process before a package ships," he said.
McCall is a serial entrepreneur who founded managed service provider Azaleos in 2005 after pioneering electronic commerce work with IBM and Lotus and a stint with Microsoft working on its Exchange messaging platform. He also was the architect and developer of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games online ticket server.
Enroute is offering for free an initial evaluation of shipping costs for any company that requests the service via the .
Users who sign up for the service and provide weekly analysis of shipping data pay .10 cents (US) per package or $100 per month for 1,000 packages.
Enroute's complete transportation management system is priced at $1 per package.