In a webinar held last week for the Transportation Intermediaries Association’s Lunch & Learn series, Trucker Tools’ C.E.O. Kary Jablonski and C.R.O. Kyler Ford joined T.I.A.’s Anthony Mascarenhas to explore the increasing popularity of ELD-based load tracking. The discussion centered on how ELD-based load tracking can provide multiple benefits to brokers, carriers and drivers. For freight brokers like you, the ability to offer ELD-based load tracking options to carriers and their drivers can boost shipper service levels through increased digital visibility of freight to ultimately make you more attractive to prospective shipper customers.
The Path to 100% Visibility Compliance
To kick off the webinar, Jablonski outlined the four different visibility technologies used by logistics providers and freight brokers in their day to day operations. These include ELD-based digital load tracking, mobile app tracking, SMS-initiated mobile tracking, and bespoke traditional track and trace mobile tracking. According to Jablonski, Trucker Tools supports all four of these types of tracking with its real-time visibility solution, which provides the path to greater visibility.
Our philosophy at Trucker Tools is that we want to be the tracking platform that aggregates all of these different kinds of tracking in one single place so as brokers you don’t have to train your carrier sales reps to work back and forth across multiple platforms.
“We’ve got a full suite of driver options that we support to catch everyone — including those really, really difficult to track carriers through track and trace,” Jablonski explained. “Across these four pillars, you can really easily see the path to 100 percent visibility compliance when you’re thinking about the different personas and types of drivers and carriers out there. Our philosophy at Trucker Tools is that we want to be the tracking platform that aggregates all of these different kinds of tracking in one single place so as brokers you don’t have to train your carrier sales reps to work back and forth across multiple platforms. You’re giving your carrier and driver communities a number of options within a single platform. We’ve also got web hooks out to the major shipper tracking platforms— including Project44 and FourKites — so that you’re able to track your freight using the preferred tracking platform for drivers and carriers and still meet shipper requirements.”
90+ ELD Integrations and 93 Percent ELD Tracking Compliance Drives Higher Service Levels
“It’s pretty simple how ELD integrations can lead to higher service levels for brokers,” said Jablonski. “An ELD integration is a one-time integration that will then continuously provide tracking information when a track has been initiated for that carrier. The more complicated answer to the question of how ELD integrations impact service is that building these integrations is not simple and they need to be really flexible in order to drive actual success. This is another way in which Trucker Tools is a market leader. We have made a ton of progress on building flexible, high fidelity ELD integrations between brokerages and carriers. For those of you on the webinar who might not be familiar with how ELD integrations work, they rely on a carrier providing certain information on asset IDs and API keys. The carrier has to provide that information to the brokerage or to Trucker Tools for us to complete the integration. That’s a complicated manual process and sometimes things go wrong. If the asset ID is even off by one digit, that integration is going to fail. We’ve been so focused on building ELD integrations for brokerages because we don’t work with shippers. We’re really focused on the broker as our core customer and we understand the customer experience for a carrier to actually provide that asset ID information over to brokers and how difficult and critical it can be.”
Jablonski went on to say that as a result of Trucker Tools’ flexible and precise integration processes on the backend, customers who integrate with ELDs are on average able to achieve 93 percent tracking compliance. In the webinar, Jablonski highlighted how one Trucker Tools’ customer who happens to be one of the biggest freight brokerages in the United States has increased freight visibility Trucker Tools. With its previous visibility technology provider, the brokerage had only been able to achieve tracking compliance in the 60 percentile. With a combination of ELD-integrated and app-based load tracking with Trucker Tools, the customer has been able to raise its tracking compliance to 85 percent, strengthening its position going into what will certainly be a competitive R.F.P. and bid season.
For more of the conversation, watch the webinar “How Driver ELD Load Tracking Drives Greater Freight Visibility” on demand.
