BY MARK B. SOLOMON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR – NEWS
MOTOR FREIGHT
LARGE TRUCK SHIPPERS THAT MOSTLY RELY
on private fleets, dedicated contract carriage, or a
combination of both to meet their obligations have
discovered in the past few years a need to supplement those services with for-hire common carriage.
However, they’ve found it difficult to decide which
shipments to assign to their private and dedicated
trucks and which should be booked with common carriers, which unlike their counterparts have
dynamic and unpredictable capacity availability.
What’s more, there is a dearth of software that can
help do the job because algorithms in the software do
not account for factors other than cost that influence
the decision to use common carriage, such as driver
availability. As a result, shippers are left to perform
manual analyses before integrating common carriers
into their evaluations, a time-consuming process that
cannot be updated easily and thus doesn’t accurately
reflect current market conditions.
That was the scenario guiding Ryder System Inc.’s
development of a tool called “TranSync,” which was
rolled out in late June after more than a year on the
drawing board. TranSync is touted by Miami-based
Ryder as the first technology to allow shippers to better mix and match their private, contract, and common carriage and to do it in real time if necessary.
If the tool works as Ryder hopes, shippers will do a
superior job of controlling their equipment capacity, improve their resource utilization, and offset the
challenge of securing drivers, rigs, and trailers. Plus,
they will be spared the need to overdeploy equipment
as a hedge against problems arising from clouded
visibility into their ongoing capacity requirements.
The TranSync tool is not designed to supplant private and dedicated fleets, which have gained in popularity as shippers seek capacity assurance and sta-
transportationreport
Mix and match …
with a little high-tech help
Ryder touts TranSync as the first technology of its kind to help shippers decide whether
to use their private and dedicated trucks or a common carrier for specific deliveries.
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