IntelliTrans says its freight management services can help address the supply chain talent shortage.
The bulk and break-bulk supply chain solutions company manages freight for customers by intervening with carriers, overseeing the dispatch process, auditing and paying freight bills, monitoring in-transit shipments, analyzing performance, and automating spot market processes.
“One of the top trends in supply chain today is the smaller supply chain talent pool,” said Ken Sherman, president of IntelliTrans. “Organizations have to get creative with attracting and retaining talent, and also utilizing the skills of available talent in conjunction with technology to help these companies do more with less. IntelliTrans takes over the burden of attraction, retention, and development of talent with agile, resilient, and customer-centric processes.”
According to IntelliTrans, it helps companies address the talent shortage by:
- Overcoming the burden of talent management: IntelliTrans services are typically priced on a per-shipment basis. By enabling shippers to procure freight management services on this basis, IntelliTrans enable companies to take what is practically a fixed cost in their organization and convert that to a variable cost. Traditionally, if their shipment volume climbs, companies would have to hire people to handle this increase. If the shipment volume drops, companies must find work for their people. With IntelliTrans Managed Services, companies can quickly scale up and down as needed without facing these talent management challenges.
- Intervening freight management processes: IntelliTrans takes over freight management processes for the team, allowing them to focus on other key initiatives, such as driving continuous improvement. IntelliTrans oversees the dispatch process to make sure shipments get covered at the lower costs, audits and pays freight bills, and checks the status of carriers. This also allows the shippers’ employees to focus on the goals they want to achieve.
- Automating spot bidding: The flexibility of the IntelliTrans tendering algorithm allows easy reconfiguration as market conditions change, giving customers the ability to choose from least-cost carrier to a service-based selection, to dedicated fleet utilization, to spot bidding, to a fixed rate offer. These can be used in concert with each other, and easily adjusted without software development required. It allows customers to conduct spot bidding in an automated fashion, where the load goes out to carriers to bid, and set two thresholds on that process. The first threshold is to accept the load immediately if a bid comes in below the threshold, which helps to increase the ability to cover loads at the lowest possible price and avoids missing out on capturing a truck and rate due to a manual review process. The second threshold is accepted at the end of the time period. If any bids came in below this threshold, the lowest one of those is automatically accepted when the time period expires. The thresholds can be set to move with current market pricing, so users don’t have to constantly reset thresholds. A similar process can be used with IntelliTrans’ Fixed Rate Offer, where a load is put out with a price on it for carriers to accept or decline. That offer can be associated with current market rates, and can leverage “surge” pricing to slowly increase the price until a carrier accepts, avoiding last-minute rate hikes to cover a load.
- Implementing technology that automates the decision-making process: IntelliTrans reduces the manual labor needed to manage the spot bidding process while getting loads covered at a price the shipper is willing to pay. Companies can make decisions faster by automating these processes, doing more with less.
“IntelliTrans is an expert in freight management using the IntelliTrans TMS,” Sherman added. “Leveraging our technology and best practices from working with over 200 customers, IntelliTrans can be extremely efficient and effective. Our customers benefit from these advanced freight management technologies and services that help mitigate the talent shortage and deliver value.”