Richard Keely has taken over as executive vice president, Americas, at conveyor
and unit handling equipment specialist
Interroll. Keely succeeds Tim McGill, who
has retired. … Pallet rack and steel tube
manufacturer Hannibal Industries has
named Reed Reynolds chief operations officer. … ITS
Logistics, a third-party logistics service
provider, has promoted Jamie Lawson
to chief financial officer. … Joseph Smith
has joined monitoring device maker
SpotSee (formerly Shock Watch) as supply
chain director. … Conveyor systems man-
ufacturer S&H Systems has announced the addition
of several staff members at its Atlanta and Jonesboro,
Ark., offices. New hires in Atlanta include Brian Rix,
director of sales; Adam Henkel, account manager;
and Chris Scheffel, senior project engineer. New
staff members in Jonesboro include Brandy Lloyd,
director of engineering; Rick Williams, project
coordinator; and Tyler Roach, project
engineer. … BDP International, a pri-
vately owned global logistics and trans-
portation solutions company, has named
Fikret Ersoy managing director for the
Middle East, Turkey, and Africa. …
FleetUp, a provider of electronic logging devices
(ELDs) and hours-of-service (HOS) compliance solutions, has promoted Charles Orlando to vice president
of marketing.
newsmakers
Descartes unveils platform giving brokers extended
visibility into capacity
Logistics software developer Descartes Systems Group
Inc. said it is piloting a capacity visibility tool that will
let freight brokers know as far as three days in advance
which trucks will be available to move their customers’
loads.
The platform leverages the pickup and delivery pat-
terns of the 115,000 carriers connected to the data-
base of the former MacroPoint LLC, which Descartes
acquired last August for $107 million in cash and
stock. MacroPoint is considered a
pioneer in truck-tracking services
where the status of approximately
2 million trucks and drivers are
connected through electronic logging devices (ELDs),
GPS-enabled smartphones, mobile phones, and trans-
portation management systems (TMS).
MacroPoint’s data are also used to predict capaci-
ty availability so users can improve their load-plan-
ning capabilities. Descartes acquired MacroPoint in the
belief its extensive carrier connections would give the
Canadian-based company a major foothold in the red-
hot truckload visibility segment.
The technology can track a vehicle moving from, say,
Denver to Chicago and that is scheduled to arrive in
three days. The Chicago destination point for that truck
thus becomes a broker’s origin point for a load to be
covered at a future date, according to Brian Hodgson,
Descartes’ vice president of transportation, and Mark
Carroll, its director of product strategy.
While traditional loadboards offer visibility services,
they are typically most effective on the day of the
move or, at the earliest, the day before it, according to
Carroll. In addition, the loadboards’ information con-
tains potentially stale or invalid data because capacity
data points are keyed in manually with no verification by
a third party, Carroll said.
By contrast, the Descartes visibility platform contains
a broader range of information, and the information is
verifiable because it is based on
real-time moves and GPS monitor-
ing of the hundreds of thousands
of fleets and drivers tied into the
MacroPoint network, Carroll said. This enables a faster
and more accurate carrier match several days out, which
results in better load planning and lower costs, he said.
Visibility solutions have become popular in the truck-
load sector as shippers, carriers, and intermediaries seek
to improve the efficiency of pickups and deliveries. A
secondary benefit is to achieve a better balance between
truck supply and demand, which is a key cause of the
capacity crunch that has driven up freight rates to levels
not seen in years, if not decades.
The Descartes executives said the next logical step
would be to offer a version of the visibility platform to
fleets. However, such an expansion is still on the drawing
board. They also said that the new tool is designed more
to promote efficiency in the supply chain than it is to
remedy the current capacity crunch.
ERSOY
LAWSON
KEELY
