It’s almost easier to find a needle in a haystack these days than to find a truckload (TL) carrier to handle a shipment. With shipping demand at high levels and capacity at a record low, the services of TL carriers in the spot market are hard to come by.
In addition to finding an available truck, load booking has become increasingly time-consuming and complex for logistics service providers (LSPs) and transportation brokers. They have to spend an inordinate amount of time using manual processes like email and phone calls or searching through load boards to find a carrier. And when they do happen to find a candidate on a load board, they have to make sure that the listing isn’t for freight outside its listed location or for stale capacity — a load that’s already been booked.
A Game Changer in Truckload Sourcing
To help LSPs and brokers find available TL carriers with more efficiency, project44 has developed “Cooperative,” a data-driven solution to increase transparency of freight capacity in the marketplace. Cooperative leverages the full scope of the project44’s Real-time Transportation Visibility Platform (RTTVP) to analyze data in its network and look into the future to find potential backhauls on existing carrier runs.
Cooperative changes the game for finding prospects to haul truckload shipments. Because project44 knows the time and termination of every delivery in its network, the application can identify carriers who have terminating capacity at a specific location at a future point in time. LSPs and brokers can this use this forward-looking information to augment their load-matching processes and find potential candidates for truckload shipments.
Neutral Facilitator of Information
Unlike a load matching service, Cooperative is a neutral facilitator of information. It does not book the service or process payments. Instead, it provides quality, real-time information on specific carrier destination locations and dates in order to identify where a carrier might be a candidate for a haul on a specific lane. Because project44 is the world’s largest truckload network, Cooperative has the scale to provide a quality pool of candidates such that LSPs and brokers can improve their load matching efficiency while protecting their own private capacity networks. project44 is uniquely positioned in the supply chain industry to provide this functionality because of our real-time tracking data.
How to Join the Cooperative
So, how does a company get access to Cooperative? Existing truckload tracking customers have to opt into the program for shared pool visibility — only then can they share and receive information. All shared data is anonymized for user’s discretion and confidentiality.
Once they’re in the program and integrated with the Application Programming Interface (API), participants are enabled to see carrier data in real time within the Cooperative. Participants place a query for a time, place, truck type, and other attributes to identify when and where terminating capacity exists. The time for load availability is generated from a machine-learning Estimated-Time-of-Arrival algorithm, which gives terminating capacity on average between 36 and 48 hours out, allowing 3PLs to make more cost effective bookings.
Once the 3PL or broker identifies the best candidate to move its freight, they contact the carrier to book the capacity. Booked shipments are then placed into project44 for real-time tracking.
Cooperative Transforms Truckload Freight Sourcing
Cooperative revolutionizes the process of procuring carriers. By using Cooperative, LSPs and brokers can more readily find truckload carriers that are available on specific lanes. They will gain real-time insight into terminating capacity, know the time and location of driver availability, and unlock access to new capacity thanks to project44’s expansive carrier network of more than 150,000 carriers. The increased transparency should bring about cost savings.
Carriers will benefit as well from the program. They will gain efficiencies from hauling less deadhead miles and save staff time by not having to hunt down freight. They will become more visible to profitable loads and be able to expand their customer base to new LSPs and brokers using the project44 platform.
In today’s tight truckload marketplace, Cooperative is a win-win for LSPs, brokers, and carriers as it will allows them to “cooperate” more easily together to move spot market freight.
To help 3Pls navigate unprecedented supply chain challenges, project44 has made Cooperative free for the remainder of 2021.
