Freight Broker Software Blog

Wouldn't it be nice if the majority of the mundane duties that your traffic managers are performing could be instead performed by your customers and carriers themselves?

Imagine If You Will...

Bob's Building Materials, one of your smaller customers, has an order of lumber to be shipped from his yard in Nashville, to a construction site in Sacramento. He logs onto your secure website via a username and password that you've assigned to him, and enters the load information. When submitted, the load instantly appears on your traffic manager’s screen, as an unaccepted tender. Simultaneously your traffic manager is alerted, and the software returns Bob an email confirming receipt of the tender.

At this particular moment, your traffic manager does not have a truck available for the shipment. He chooses to sit on it for an hour or two, because he knows that...

John's Get-It-There Express, a carrier you use from time to time, logs onto your secure carrier website using the username and password you've assigned him. There he sees limited information about a flatbed load that picks up in Nashville and drops in Sacramento. It so happens that John has a truck ending up in Nashville, so he enters a bid of "$1.25 per mile" on the load and submits it.

He also updates positions of a few of his trucks so that your traffic manager sees where and when they'll be available.

Your traffic manager is instantly alerted to this bid, but would rather not book it with John’s company, due to performance issues that the system alerts him to on past loads he done. He chooses to hold off, rather than immediately declining John the load. He’d like to move it, good paying loads are hard to come by. He still has an hour or so to accept or decline the load tender from Bob's Building Materials, and he knows from past experience that he should wait, because he knows that..

Suzie-Q Carriers Limited sees the available load via her RSS feed to your available load web page. This gives her the ability to view loads that you have available without even logging onto your website. She quickly enters a bid of "$1.20 per mile + FSC" on the Nashville to Sacramento load and submits it. Once again, instantly, the traffic manager is alerted of the new bid. He's never worked with Suzie before, but the system runs a check and shows that her qualifications are in order, and her performance on past loads was good.

With a single keystroke, the traffic manager tenders the load to Suzie. She is sent an email with a link to the page to use to accept it, which she does. Your traffic manager is immediately notified of the acceptance, and in turn accepts the load tender from Bob's Building Materials. The system takes care of notifying John's Get-It-There Express that the load is no longer available, so he doesn't have to worry about that. Nor does he have to worry about calling Bob, the system has already sent him an email alerting him that the tender has been accepted.

Suzie doesn't have a decent trucking software system with EDI, so she uses your carrier website to enter in the load appointment and status information as it moves. Immediately after she submits the data, it's available to your traffic manager, and more importantly, Bob can see the location and system-generated ETA for his load from his customer website as it progresses. Your traffic manager knows that he does not need to monitor this data, as if Suzie’s truck gets behind, the software will automatically change the status of the load to "late" and send him an alert. It doesn't, so he instead spends his time matching up a few of the available trucks that John submitted with some lesser priority loads.

Once the load has been delivered, Suzy logs on and enters the delivery dates and times. She also creates and submits her invoice to you through your website, along with scanned copies of the proof of delivery documents. This speeds up your cash flow, as well as hers, as you can electronically bill Bob for the load now via EDI, or...

You can create an electronic-only copy of the invoice to Bob, which he'll receive via RSS feed. Immediately after you create the invoice, the POD documents that Suzy submitted (minus her invoice of course) are attached to it, and Bob can access all of them in a single PDF document. No emailing, no snail mailing, no hassle.

Suzy can access information on any load she's ever hauled for you, and that means a lot to her. In fact, it's a factor in the rate she offers you, she doesn’t need to purchase better software when you offer her the services that you do.

After payment is received from Bob, and an allocated amount of time has passed, the system generates a check to Suzy.

Bob was so satisfied with the service he received from you, he immediately views the other equipment you have available for booking on your website, and tenders you another load.

Time your staff spent on the entire lifecycle of this load: 15 seconds. Nice, huh?

Ask us today for a free demonstration.

Greg Dodson
President
TruckMaster Logistics Systems, Inc.
TruckMaster Your Freight Brokerage™