Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/201087
technology in focus: FREIGHT MATCHING Serving up loads Freight matching services can automate load selection BY AARON HUFF A useful feature – or curse, depending on your point of view – of shopping from large online retailers like Amazon, Target and eBay is the suggestions you receive for purchases. They appear on the website while you shop and in advertisements as you browse other websites. Online retailers are using big data to predict their customers' product needs and preferences. To an extent, the same could be said for Internet-based freight matching services. The basics of freight matching have not changed; carriers still use it to search for loads that meet specific criteria for origins, destinations and equipment types. Today, some sites suggest loads and routes to users that 48 they otherwise might not have considered to maximize profits. Round-trip pricing DAT's RateView subscription tool for benchmarking spot and contract rates is designed to give small carriers the same complex lane and pricing analysis that large carriers use for making routing decisions. Carriers quickly can compare the rates they are being paid against the market rates on lanes they are running, as well as explore new lanes. With RateView, carriers select specific lanes to view pricing information, such as from Atlanta to Dallas. RateView instantly shows the lane's contract and spot-market rates and recommends backhaul options to show carriers the pricing they should COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2013 expect to negotiate to cover their costs for the roundtrip. Within RateView, a Tri-Haul Routing feature shows the best options for twolegged returns and total revenue for the trip. The feature ranks the pricing of all possible markets that the carrier could route a truck through for a roundtrip. It instantly returns the top five plausible two-legged options, such as from Dallas to Memphis to Atlanta or Dallas to New Orleans to Atlanta. RateView has direct integration with DAT's Power load board so that carriers can contact shippers and brokers that have loads in the lanes they have identified using the pricing and route analysis tools. With a mouse click, DAT users can call the contacts directly using Skype integration. DAT RateView, which is based on $20 billion per year of actual freight transactions, also provides 13-month rate histories and information critical to seasonal trend analysis.