Author Archives: tmiller

How Technology Can Be Applied To Solve The Driver Shortage Problem

As our economy continues to grow, due in part to recent federal tax reform, the trucking industry has seen a robust demand for freight, however, one issue continues to plague the trucking industry – driver shortage and the ability to quickly on-board drivers.

In a recent survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, driver shortage was deemed to be the largest concerns by trucking companies trumping even the recent ELD mandate. Driver retention (another large contributor to company’s shortage issue) also made the list at #3.

We often ask ourselves is what are some of the fundamental pain points our industry is facing and how can technology be utilized to help solve these issues. With this in mind, we have identified 4 major issues that we believe can be solved with the right on-boarding software:

  1. The Inability to quickly acquire resumes – Every potential driver that is looking to work for you must first fill out the necessary forms, but acquiring and distributing these forms to the right hands in your organization is no simple task. The best way to tackle this is to find a system that allows you to easily receive driver on-boarding information from your website and quickly get it in the hands of the right person to process it. If you’re still processing resumes by hand, you are burning valuable time and money.
  2. No centralized system for managing incoming applications – A lot of companies don’t have a system that is designed specifically for on-boarding drivers. This causes issues as there is no way to properly track and mange each application that comes in the door. In order to modernize this process, key personnel within your organization need to have a software offering where they can quickly reference information on any incoming candidates. This will allow them to properly manage the on-boarding process.
  3. Tedious safety and background checks – So you have your driver applications in the hands of the right person and can quickly track the status of each resume, but how do you know what drivers are truly a good fit for your company? Obtaining the resumes is only half the battle, now the tedious background check must begin. The best solution for this is to use an on-boarding platform that seamlessly integrates with online pre-screening sources so you can instantly see if your prospect driver is right for the job.
  4. Too much manual data entry – Finally, you found the right driver for the job and are ready to forward with the hiring process…., but the work has just begun.  You still need to enter the driver’s information into your transportation management system (TMS), and if you lose the driver, you need to remove the driver from the system. Considering driver turn-over is well over 100% for most companies, this could be a full-time job alone. The best answer to solve this is to find a system that integrates with your TMS and handles the data entry for you.

In conclusion, there are several onboarding tools out there that can greatly help you with driver onboarding, if you aren’t using one today, we strongly suggest you give one a try. If you feel the solutions we spoke to above would help you improve your operation, we would recommend you give us a call, our VIA® platform might be a good ft for you.

We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.

You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter.

What Does 100% Visibility Really Mean?

The word visibility gets tossed around in the brokerage industry, but what does that really mean? To some, that might imply external load tracking, but is that really 100% visibility? Is your business really only about watching freight move down the road on a little map?

Visibility should be mean the ability to watch your entire business from the 30,000 foot view. You should have visibility into where your current quotes are in the sales process, what the going rates are from your partner carriers, which carriers have historically been better for you, the status of every order in your system, and of course where your loads are at the moment – this is a given.

So how does one truly achieve 100% visibility to their operations, their partners, and their loads? We have spent a lot of time asking ourselves this question as well as talking with brokers to see what they really need. The answer comes down to bringing the right tools to the job.

Your core business success rest on your relationship with your customers – so let us start there. In order to truly provide visibility to your customers, you need a place where customers can interact with you instantly, a customer portal in which rates and potential business can be communicated between teams in real-time. A customer portal allows you to strengthen communication with your customers therefore making it easier to satisfy their requests and inevitably building a much stronger business relationship.

So you have accomplished visibility to your customers and streamlined the ability to handle their requests, but this doesn’t help unless you are able to quickly process the quote requests you are receiving. You need a tool that allows you to receive rates from your carriers and get quotes back to your customers immediately. In order to accomplish this, you need to be directly connected to your carriers so you can pull rates instantly and from multiple carriers at the same time.

Now that you have 100% real-time visibility to your customers, carriers, quotes, rates, and bids, it is finally time to begin tracking the actual loads in motion. There are several solutions on the market that utilize a driver’s cell phone’s built in GPS to provide location data, but what you really need is a service that provides the driver a very simple onboarding process, automates arrival / departure status updates through geofencing, and is fully connected with your systems. This is the only true way of ensuring the data is making it back to you as well as your customers.

At Tranztec, we listen, and listening to our customers and better understanding their needs and requirements before suggesting or crafting a solution has been a core element to our success over the past 20 years. When we built our VIA platform from brokers, we truly took the time to listen for years before writing the first line of code. We proudly stand behind our belief that our product truly provides the best toolset on the market for providing complete visibility to brokers.  

Although the product has been live for several years now, we continue to listen to our customers, and their feedback comes in the form of updates to our product every single month. It is our mission to change what brokers feel 100% visibility actually means, and it is something we strive to improve every day. 

We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.

You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter.

Meet Tranztec…

We started Tranztec in 2001 with the goal of making the transportation space a place more easily navigated. Our founder and CEO, Toby Miller, had been working with TMW and other industry leading platforms for years and wanted to find a way to connect various legacy software offerings together to better enhance the overall experience and productivity of the industry as a whole.

It wasn’t long after, Tranztec’s patented Tranzactor platform was born – a middleware application which would change the industry as we know it. Tranzactor allowed integrations between TMS (transportation management systems) and numerous other offerings such as MobileComm units, load boards, fuel cards, imaging systems, and many more to be built and operational in weeks instead of months or even years.

For the next 15 years, we continued to grow our partnerships with TMW, McLeod, MercuryGate, and other leading TMS providers and built a robust integration library that offered connections between just about every transportation related platform in the market.

 In 2017, we launched VIA – our latest offering and a product that truly encompasses our 17 years of innovation in the space by taking everything we have built so far and combining it with a modern web-based interphase that allows users to manage their transportation business (whether a broker, shipper, or carrier) like never before.     

In the past 9 months, we have on-boarded more than 150 carriers to the VIA platform, however, to us, VIA is a project that never is complete. VIA truly stands as a symbol for what our company really is because VIA, like Tranztec, is a living product that continues to evolve and grow in an effort to make this space just a little bit better for everyone. 

We stand proud of what we have accomplished, but feel this is only the beginning….

We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.

You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter.

Meet VIA…

In 2017, we launched VIA – our latest offering and a product that truly encompasses our 17 years of innovation in the space by taking everything we have built so far and combining it with a modern web-based interphase that allows users to manage their transportation business (whether a broker, shipper, or carrier) like never before.    

But what is VIA? What does it do? And why do you need it?

VIA is an ecosystem and an ever-evolving product where users can collaborate with customers, trading partners, drivers, and colleagues in real-time.

 VIA makes it easier than ever to obtain carrier rates, manage quotes, dispatch trucks, and track loads because it connects everyone together so communication can be more streamlined.

VIA breaks to conventional mold of ripping out and replacing by allowing users to continue using what they have, but fill in gaps where they are needed. This is accomplished by offering real-time 2-way data sync between VIA and any product with an API on the market today. 

You are going to love VIA and so will your customers. VIA is going to allow you to build a cohesive bond between your team, your drivers, and your customers that will truly enhance their experience as well as your own.

We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.

You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter.

Helping The Small Carrier Survive In A World Of Rising Costs

In today’s market, most of the major shippers are demanding full visibility to their freight. Whether this comes in the form of EDI or load consolidation solutions such as FourKites, MacroPoint, or Project 44, the shipper’s heightened requirements usually leave the carrier footing the bill.

The large carriers have learned to adapt or even build these new costs of doing business into their pricing, but small trucking companies are now struggling to front new financial burdens attached to their already razor-thin margins per load.

At Tranztec, we have watched the small carrier struggle and have stepped in to offer the following solutions to help keep the little guys keep afloat:

  1. Load Consolidation Platform Integration – Over the past decade, Tranztec has built integrations with Macropoint, 10-4, FourKites, Project44, and many more. When you become part of our patented VIA ecosystem, you are full access to these integrations free of cost beyond our monthly subscription. VIA automatically syncs your data to the platform of your shipper’s choice so you can continue doing business as usual.

  2. EDI Integration – EDI is often required by large shippers and almost always expensive. EDI requires two fundamental pieces, both of which are cost prohibitive to small carriers.
    1. In order to send and receive EDI, a Value Added Network Provider (VAN) is required. VANs charge on a per character basis making it very difficult to assume costs and build it into pricing.
    1. Additionally, most EDI requires the use of a costly transportation management platform (TMS) of which small carriers do not have.

Our VIA platform solves both issues – We eliminate per character EDI charges bypassing the VAN and directly connecting with your trading partners. In addition, we provide a portal for interacting with incoming EDI eradicating the need for a TMS altogether.

We are here to help and want to help small carriers because we recognize the value they bring to the industry. With new ELD requirements and the continued up-tick in cost of doing business, we feel every little bit helps. Our goal has been, and always will be, to help business grow and in return grow our own company. We hope these new innovations help pave that path.

We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.

You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter. e

Solving The Fundamental Issues Of The Brokerage Industry

We have been in the industry for over 18 years and one thing we often notice is the lack of a system designed specifically for brokers.

There are a lot of transportation management platforms out there that claim to handle a broker’s everyday operations and business needs, but why do so many of them seem to fall short or feel more catered to the carrier?

Our VIA platform was designed to help brokers better manage their orders throughout the entire lifecycle of the load by tackling each of the following areas where others fall short.

  1. Customer Portal
    1. The core of any brokerage exists in its ability to communicate with their customers. VIA provides users with an intuitive portal that can be used to share information back and forth with clients such as BOL, load status, quotes, quote requests, invoices, and much more. 
    2. To further enhance the experience, VIA also allows brokers to communicate instantly with their customers using our embedded chat system.
  2. Quote & Bid Management
    1. A fundamental problem in running a brokerage office is minimizing effort spent on generating quotes. In addition, work is often being repeated because employees don’t have a collaborative space where information can be shared freely. VIA stops this problem by allowing entire teams to work together in a space where quotes, bids, and crucial information can be accessed by anyone and shared instantly with your customer.
  3. Carrier Rates
    1. An essential piece of running a brokerage is acquiring carrier rates for routes. VIA revolutionizes this process by connecting directly to a carrier’s API and pulling rates automatically. What does this mean for the broker? It means a rep can type in a route and see a list of rates from their favorite carriers instantly with ever picking up the phone or sending an email.
  4. Carrier Network & EDI
    1. To further enhance the communication between brokers and carriers, VIA allows brokers to invite carriers into a private network where load location, status, BOL, invoices, and other critical items can be shared in real-time.
    2. As with the customer portal, brokers can also chat with their carriers using the instant messaging built right into the VIA platform.
    3. In addition, VIA has the ability to send EDI to carriers such as 204 (load tenders) as well as 214 (status updates) to customers automatically.
  5. External Load Tracking & Management
    1. In the past decade, complete load visibility has become the standard and customers are now demanding the ability to instantly access the status of their loads. VIA provides the fastest, most cost effective, and most flexible external load tracking solution on the market. Just enter a driver’s number and the system will send a text message to the driver. When the driver accepts, you will have full insight on your load. There is no app to download on the driver’s end and no setup required on the broker’s end.
    2. VIA also offers a fully interactive map complete with color indicated status reports and bread crumb mapping.
  6. Split Loads
    1. A huge issue in the brokerage industry is the inability for any TMS to properly manage split loads. VIA…
  7. Invoicing / Bill-To
    1. Funding is important, it is the fundamental reason for doing business. VIA’s ecosystem between customers, brokers, and carriers allows all parties to get paid faster because the invoicing process is instantaneous.
    2. Because VIA knows the status of any load, it can automatically send 210 (invoices) to the broker from the carrier when the load is completed. Furthermore, it can send invoices to customers simultaneously.
  8. Reporting
    1. Metrics have always been essential to business, but in today’s brokerage market, customers are now requiring business intelligence analytics in the form of reports like never before. 
    2. VIA can provide users and customers real-time reporting capabilities in a shared environment further enhancing a broker’s ability to satisfy customers and grow their business.

We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.

You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter.