Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/741843
52 commercial carrier journal | october 2016 technology Better response Carriers, brokers using tech to speed work during freight slowdown BY AARON HUFF S tephanie Rider is responding to an abnormally high volume of bid requests this year. According to the Cass Truckload Linehaul Index, year- over-year contract freight rates fell 1.6 percent in July, the fifth straight month of decline. This year's spot market pric- ing is below 2015 averages. "Everyone is looking at making changes – shippers want lower prices," said Rider, a rate analyst for Gainesville, Ga.-based Syfan Transport and Syfan Lo- gistics, which has 125 trucks in expedited dry van and refrigerated operations. The need for technology Bid packages from shippers and third-party logistics providers can be a time-consuming process for fleets and brokers, with hundreds – and potentially thousands – of lanes to analyze and price. Some bids arrive as emails with at- tached Excel files containing grids of lane data. Other bids require carriers and bro- kers to login to a website. Many online bid packages have an option to download an Excel file, Rider said. Some bids do not include mileages for lanes and require lookups using a separate application. Carriers and freight brokers also have to find current market rates to compare with their own costs and margins in each lane. TMW Systems recently released a web- based business management application for carriers, brokers and 3PLs that lever- ages pricing from TMW's Market Rate Index and replaces the use of spread- sheets, emails, paperwork and other manual processes, the company said. Fast analysis When receiving a bid package, Rider nar- rows down the file to the lanes of interest for Syfan. She then imports the con- densed file to McLeod Software's Pricing and Bid Management module that is integrated with its LoadMaster transpor- tation management software system for carriers and PowerBroker for brokers. The module automatically im- ports mileage for each lane through an interface with ALK Technologies' PC Miler mileage calculator. The pricing module imports each lane's market rates, including those from Market Insight, a McLeod rate index that uses data collected anonymously from hundreds of carriers and brokers that use LoadMaster and PowerBroker, respec- tively. The module also imports spot market rates from Internet Truckstop, DAT and the client's own historical data. "That has had a huge impact on being able to see more accurate history," Rider said. "If I just consider the exact origin and destination, it will not always be an exact match." Completing the bid Once Rider completes the initial work in the module, she exports a file to a custom spreadsheet to import data from LoadMaster and PowerBroker. "I take a mean of the different indices and compare that to what we have done historically, to what we are currently hauling at, and to what our margins are," she said. "We are looking closer at how much it costs to run a truck." With the information in one spread- sheet, Rider can determine "if we have room to move or not." Once the pricing is determined, Rider modifies the custom spreadsheet back to the original format required by the customer. The technology Syfan uses helps to process the increased bid requests and make pricing decisions efficiently. in focus: BID MANAGEMENT With overcapacity in the market, Syfan Trans- port and Syfan Logistics are receiving a larger volume of bid packages from shippers. McLeod Software's Pricing and Bid Manage- ment module allows users to compare and rank customers and loads by lane.