The freight transportation industry is in a technology renaissance, with more start-ups launching products and services aimed at logistics and transportation in the past two years than the previous 10. Silicon Valley has discovered transportation as the next “legacy” industry to be disrupted by new tech — especially freight brokerage. All modes are in play, whether it’s less-than -truckload, intermodal, truckload, drayage, parcel, expedited, or last-mile.
At Trucker Tools, we believe the truckload brokerage market has the most promise for new technology to drive rapid, positive transformation. More than 80 percent of full-load road freight in the US is moved by small fleets and single-truck owner-operators. It’s the most fragmented of all the segments, and the one in which there is a thriving market of brokerage firms acting as the facilitator connecting available trucks with available loads.
The brokerage industry has long needed technology transformation, particularly new tools that streamline how capacity is located, secured, and matched with freight. Players are taking one of two paths:
- Disintermediation: Businesses like Uber Freight and similar “clean-sheet-of-paper” tech start-ups. These seemed determined to do away with the traditional broker, installing a new paradigm that emphasizes technology and diminishes the value of the relationship between driver, broker and shipper
- Enablement: Companies like Trucker Tools, where the focus is on partnering with, engaging, and enabling the broker with technology tools and solutions that leverage and complements skills, reduce costs, and elevate the broker as a new competitive force
In the “enabling” model, facilitating technology is dramatically improving broker process productivity, how quickly and accurately they find and secure capacity, and how they manage carriers. Knowledge, market intelligence, relationships, and business acumen are retained and strengthened.
Technology aside, the truckload business is still very much about people working together to make the most efficient and optimal use of capacity. Technology is the enabler. People deliver the value. We’re all-in with brokers as their trusted technology partner in this journey to transform an industry that’s the lifeblood of our economy.