Jun 16, 2022

6 Keys Steps for Owner Operator to Navigate Down Markets

6 Keys Steps for Owner Operator to Navigate Down Markets

Route planning tool helps drivers overcome daily frustrations <p>High driver turnover is an issue almost everyone in the logistics industry is familiar with, if not grappling with, as drivers jump between carriers in pursuit of better opportunities.</p> <p>Drivers leave jobs for a variety of reasons — to receive a sign-on bonus or pay raise at a different trucking company, to seek routes closer to home, to find better management or even to change professions.</p> <p><a href="https://truckerpath.com/">Trucker Path</a> has been giving truck drivers tools since 2013 to make navigating life on the road more enjoyable and efficient, keeping more people in the driver’s seat. It does this through one critical action: listening to drivers. <p>“So many companies in the logistics industry funnel a large amount of money into technology development, but few remember to ask those who are using the technology daily what their needs are and what works best for them,” said Chris Oliver, chief marketing officer at Trucker Path.</p> <p>At its core, Trucker Path is an app built off of crowdsourced feedback from drivers. While drivers are likely to find benefits and drawbacks working for any motor carrier, they encounter the same day-to-day realities that come with driving a semi-truck no matter what company name is on their door. Trucker Path listens to what drivers need and hands them the tools to mitigate some of the most common struggles they face everywhere they go.</p> <p>Tied for No. 1 on the list of issues drivers face are compensation and truck parking, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s <a href="https://truckingresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ATRI-Top-Industry-Issues-2021.pdf">2021 survey</a> of critical industry issues. The next top four spots are detention and delay at customer facilities, fuel prices, driver training standards and hours-of-service rules.</p> <p>By crowdsourcing information from drivers, Trucker Path helps them plan their routes and enables them to alter those plans when necessary. It helps them find available parking, be prepared for weigh stations, know what to expect at shipping docks and helps drivers save money on fuel. Trucker Path does this by connecting drivers with hundreds of thousands of points of interest along their routes and sharing the ratings, reviews and real-time updates provided by millions of other drivers within the Trucker Path community.</p> <p>“It’s almost a symbiotic relationship between the platform and technology and the driver base itself,” Oliver said.</p> <p>Drivers can see and share information such as availability of truck stop overnight parking, quality of truck stops, whether a weigh station is open and its wait time, shipping dock wait time, as well as nearby maintenance facilities, restaurants, stores and more.</p> <p>The app also shows fuel stations and fuel-optimized routes that help drivers save money along the way to their destinations. Other insights, such as specific truck entrances at docks and the ability to share feedback regarding sharp turns and other truck restrictions, provide even greater navigational efficacy for drivers as they plan and drive their routes.</p> <p>By providing feedback in the app about these points of interest, drivers are able to help other users.</p> <p>Trucker Path recently also launched its COMMAND TMS solution, which integrates into the Trucker Path app. COMMAND allows carriers to do such things as manage drivers and assets, source loads, build jobs, dispatch, provide instantaneous location and progress updates, scan documents and create invoices.</p> <p>“Having your TMS directly tied to the most popular app for truckers makes for a much easier experience and smoother implementation and user experience for both sides,” Oliver said. “About a third of long-haul drivers already use Trucker Path as it is. So there’s a very good chance from a fleet perspective that when you implement COMMAND, what you’re really doing is using the driver’s preferred tool they’re already using to serve the fleet’s purposes.”</p> <p>DISPATCH is another new service recently made available by Trucker Path. Personal dispatchers take the time to get to know their driver customers, including their lane and commodity preferences, where they live, how long they like to run, and what their favorite restaurants are, in order to help find them the best jobs that not only pay well but adhere to their personal preferences. Once the loads are sourced and agreed to, the dispatchers send the job to the driver’s Trucker Path app, which allows them to either accept or reject a load.</p> <p>“The dispatchers themselves are really a conduit or concierge to all our technologies, helping customers recognize all the benefits we offer via a personal touch and a familiar voice,” Oliver said.</p> <p>Giving drivers the ability to make their daily work lives more productive and convenient is a direct path to boosting driver satisfaction and increasing efficiency and productivity for the entire company.</p> <p> <strong>Source: </strong> <strong><a href="https://www.freightwaves.com/news/route-planning-tool-helps-drivers-overcome-daily-frustrations">FREIGHT WAVES</a></strong></p>

Apr 28, 2022

How Fleets Can Use Technology To Recruit and Retain Drivers <p>On the careers page of FirstFleet’s website, the Tennessee trucking company shares a video explaining its core values with the acronym SERVE. The final E in the acronym stands for “embrace change as a reality of progress," and that includes the evolution of technology.</p> <p>The company boasts its technology to not only attract new drivers but also retain existing drivers, which is important when recruiting, interviewing, training and dealing with costly driver turnover and an industrywide driver shortage. </p> <p>“Holistically, technology is absolutely a piece of the equation for attracting and retaining driver talent. I would not say that necessarily every driver who comes to FirstFleet chooses us because of that. I would say that we do see technology as a supporting component of being a reputable and enjoyable place of employment,” said FirstFleet CIO Austin Henderson. “There has been a long history of transportation companies having technology but not fully utilizing it down to the driver’s hands. If it can make the drivers’ lives better, or their job a little bit easier, or save them 15 minutes, we're going to try our best to make that interaction as efficient as possible. Technology is … one of the primary ways we do that.”</p> <p>While most trucking companies realize the importance of technology – with things like predictive maintenance and trailer tracking to increase uptime, for example – as a business tool to help boost productivity, not as many recognize technology as a way to recruit and retain drivers.</p> <p>“Lord knows when it comes to recruiting, everybody talks about the rate per mile and general benefits, but ‘we care, and we want to give you tools to make life a little bit easier’ seems to get lost sometimes in that message,” said Chris Oliver, chief marketing officer at Trucker Path. “The real key there is to focus on the (driver) side of the equation, making life easier and more comfortable when they're on the road, helping to just make a day in the life a little bit better. So many technologies as a whole focus so hard on the business and the productivity gains that they tend to overlook – or maybe not even think about – what it does for the driver.”</p> <p>Trucker Path offers a mobile app for truckers that can provide the most efficient and direct route to a destination while also showing drivers where the best tacos are along that route, among other features. The company recently launched a new transportation management system, COMMAND, that is designed to enhance driver relationships and quality of life while managing operations.</p> <p>Motorcity, a transport and logistics software developer, also recently launched a technology designed to make the driver’s life easier by enhancing communication between drivers and dispatchers. RELAY is a cloud-based communication platform that provides real-time dispatch-to-driver messaging.</p> <p>“That’s really what RELAY is all about is to modernize the dispatch-to-fleet communication into what I call the modern world, and beyond that, it's more about relationship management and getting the dispatch side closer to the driver,” said Motorcity President and co-founder Bob Stemple. “Historically, there's been this lag between the time you send a message and the time the driver actually receives it. Of course, drivers are on limited clocks, so minutes add up, and it reduces the hours they can drive when they have to wait for either load information or response to questions and things like that.”</p> <p>Stemple said nobody wants to sit in a cold truck in Michigan staring at a box, waiting for a message, and RELAY helps decrease that downtime and increase retention in the process by relieving some of the frustration. RELAY also offers a feature that recognizes drivers’ birthdays and work anniversaries, among other things.</p> <p>“We all know driver retention and attraction is an issue,” Stemple said. “It just seems very basic to me that if you can streamline the communication with your fleet, you're going to have a better relationship with your drivers, and then they're going to be more satisfied than staring at a box waiting for a message.”</p> <p>When Stemple first started working in the trucking industry, Qualcomm was the big telematics player, allowing companies to send messages to drivers with only a three-minute waiting period. But three minutes per message adds up quickly, taking too much time when modern-day technology is real-time. </p> <p>“Those are the spaces that I would love to see technology continue to evolve is how to give drivers back those precious 15-minute segments of their time that collectively, over a 14-hour workday, amount to significant quality-of-life differences,” Henderson said.</p> <p>And that is important to driver recruitment and retention in an environment where tensions are high as drivers focus on safety, hours of service and regulations. So when a trucking company can offer technology to improve drivers’ lives, they should use that to their advantage as a recruiting tool, he said.</p> <p>“A driver’s worst fear is sitting there being detained or broken down on the side of the road. They're generally not getting compensated well, for that … so drivers want the wheels to be turning. That gets into the fact that the driver may or may not make it home for that baseball game for his son or daughter,” Henderson said. “At the end of the day, technology solutions that focus on making the professional driver’s quality of life better is where we need to focus some significant effort.”</p> <p>But Oliver said, if it’s about quality of life, it is important for companies to also consider how much extra work any given technology will require a driver to take on in order to gain efficiencies because it's easy to overwhelm drivers with the vast number of features available to “make their lives easier” that it can actually make it more complicated.</p> <p>Oliver said the ELD mandate was a major tipping point for the industry because it forced everyone to use the technology ubiquitously, opening the gate for additional technology advancements. But companies need driver buy-in to make it work.</p> <p>While most drivers carry a smartphone these days, using technology might not always be an attraction, he said, especially for old-school drivers who are more comfortable making a call than using an app.</p> <p>He said it’s important for companies that choose to market technology in their recruitment to be mindful of the messaging and how it makes the driver feel.</p> <p>But overall, trucking companies should consider marketing their use of technology to prospective drivers, said Ken Van Heel of Motorcity.</p> <p>“I do think that would be a piece that they would use as part of their outreach to attract drivers – that they're investing in the latest technology to bring the most efficiency to the communication and to the drivers’ operation.”</p> <p>Source:<a href="https://www.ccjdigital.com/technology/article/15289785/trucking-fleets-can-use-tech-in-driver-recruitment-retention">CCJ Digital</a></p>

Mar 19, 2022

Small Fleet recap: How should owner-operators manage downturns? <p align=center>Understanding your costs and developing quality relationships are key, says Trucker Path’s Oliver</p> <p>This fireside chat recap is from the FreightWaves virtual Small Fleet & Owner-Operator Summit on Wednesday.</p> <p><strong>FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC:</strong> What steps can owner-operators take to manage downturns?</p> <p><strong>DETAILS:</strong> Owner-operators face increasing uncertainty in the freight markets, but there are steps they can take to handle whatever the market throws at them. Understanding your costs and building quality relationships serve carriers better than taking the “bear down and hope” approach that small fleets have operated under in the past.</p> <p><strong>SPEAKER:</strong> Chris Oliver is the chief marketing officer of Trucker Path.</p> <p><strong>BIO:</strong> Oliver has more than 25 years’ experience leading small to midsize businesses. In addition to Trucker Path, he led growth and development efforts for several transportation brands, including Cargomatic, Zonar and PrePass. He holds degrees in marketing, international management and finance.</p> <p><strong>KEY QUOTES FROM OLIVER</strong></p> <p>“It all comes down to the basics. How do you know if you’re making any money if you don’t understand what your costs are? So the very first that you have to do is understand those costs. And there’s a lot to consider there — it’s not just your truck and your fuel.” </p> <p>“Over time, after you have built a relationship and trust and that shipper knows you’re a go-to guy that’s going to get the job done for you, they tend to loosen the purse strings a little and trust you a little bit more and share a little bit more of the revenue. Just to build those types of go-to relationships over time is just a smart thing to do.”</p> <p>“We’re not just here to book a load, send it to you and get our little percentage out of the way. We’re trying to help people be better businesspeople.” </p> <strong>Source</strong>:<strong> <a href="https://www.freightwaves.com/news/small-fleet-recap-how-should-owner-operators-manage-downturns">FreightWaves </a></strong>

Jun 17, 2022