Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/251785
FromtheDeskofScott Scott Moscrip, CEO I know what you are thinking. You see a heading like proposals and already your guts are tied in knots, you have broken out in a cold sweat, your thinking is going fuzzy, and it can only mean more work ahead! Have no fear! I am not going to be talking about difficult proposals like asking someone out on a date. I am going to talk about proposals to do business. We all get them. ey come in various forms, shapes, and sizes and most are unwanted. I get them all the time in my e-mail. Frequently they are lonely girls looking for company or wealthy foreigners looking for help to move $7 million out of their country and put it into my bank account. All they need is my bank routing and account number and then I will see the money! As a carrier, you get proposals all the time as well. I frequently hear about proposals such as someone calling you asking if you can haul a load of ice cream from Los Angeles to Miami but all your trailers are open deck trailers, or you drive a van and someone contacts you about hauling a 200,000-pound road grater, or you only haul loads in Texas but someone contacts you to see if you are willing to take a load from Illinois to Alaska. ese may sound like extreme cases but they happen much more frequently than they need to. As an industry, we need to do a better job of matching up freight-hauling opportunities with carriers, their capacities, and their capabilities. To help solve these challenges; we have created Internet Truckstop's new Request for Proposal (RFP) product. For our carrier customers, it is the easiest way to find new business that more closely matches what you are looking to haul. Since deregulation began back in the late 1970s, the problem facing shippers is how to find carrier capacity and how much it will cost to move it. Large fleets stepped in and put proposals in front of shippers and competed with other large fleets. ese companies didn't know how to contact small or mid-sized fleets and as a result, small and mid- sized carriers rarely got to bid on freight lanes. e new ITS RFP product allows all the small and mid-sized fleets the opportunity to start seeing these RFPs and to start bidding on lanes that work for them. So how does all this work? An RFP customer of Internet Truckstop will provide us a list of lanes and will give us the criteria of the carriers from whom they are interested in receiving proposals. ose target carriers can be picked by fleet size, service area, Internet Truckstop CPR rating, trailer types, and more. e system will then send out an invitation to those fleets via e-mail inviting them and their company to participate in the RFP being put out by the customer. If you are interested, you simply click the link, place your bids, and await notification of award from the lanes on which you have bid. Why should you be excited about this? is is the first time, small and mid-sized carriers have had their service advertised for bid and you can get an invitation because you are an Internet Truckstop customer. In one of the first RFPs to run through the system, the customer doing the RFP was used to getting about 40 proposals back. By putting the RFP out to a targeted group of ITS carriers, they were able to get more than 2,000 proposals back which allowed them to increased their core carrier base from 25 to more than 200 core carriers—adding small and mid- sized carriers into their systems. As a carrier who uses Internet Truckstop, you qualify for this service and it is part of your standard monthly membership fee. So the next time you get an e-mail from the Internet Truckstop RFP system, open it right up because opportunity awaits! P.S. I would like to give a shout out to Dialvan, Inc. out of Laredo, Texas. eir son Adrian — an industrial and systems engineering major — recently endured one of my 80-minute presentations at Texas A&M University and had the courage to admit, in front of his classmates, that his father's company was in business because of Internet Truckstop. So call up his dad, Jaime, at (956) 724-2910 and do business with their company (they haul intrastate Texas loads and also into/out of Mexico). Who knows, you may even talk to Adrian if he is home from school and working in the family business as he has for many years! P R O P O S A L S 4 IT MAGAZINE V o l . 8 , N o . 1