Sophisticated TMS & Real-time Visibility Transforms Freight Operations
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Descartes Aljex™
- Descartes MacroPoint™
Tech Stack
- Cloud-based TMS
- Real-time freight visibility
- EDI
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Transportation Management Systems (TMS)
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Transportation
- E-Commerce
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Fleet Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Freight Scouts is the non-asset transportation brokerage division of PBD Worldwide, a leader in fulfillment and distribution services for eCommerce companies, retailers, associations, and faith-based organizations. Based in Atlanta, Freight Scouts focuses on delivering exceptional freight solutions for clients, including truckload (TL), less-than-truckload (LTL), and parcel shipping. The company handles a diverse range of freight types, such as construction supplies, refrigerated freight, consumer goods, and modular buildings. Freight Scouts is committed to providing 'Exceptional Service every time,' leveraging advanced logistics solutions to enhance operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall performance.
The Challenge
Freight Scouts, an Atlanta-based broker, faced significant challenges in managing truckload (TL) and less-than-truckload (LTL) freight originating from fulfillment centers managed by its parent company, PBD Worldwide. The company serves a diverse range of customers and load types, including construction supplies, refrigerated freight, consumer goods, and modular buildings. However, the existing transportation management system (TMS) was inefficient in handling TL transactions, leading to operational inefficiencies. Additionally, manual load tracking was error-prone, compromising customer service. Freight Scouts needed a brokerage-focused logistics solution that could manage the lifecycle of shipments from order creation through execution. The company also required an integrated real-time visibility solution to optimize delivery performance and strengthen customer and carrier relationships.
The Solution
To address its operational challenges, Freight Scouts implemented the Descartes Aljex™ transportation management system (TMS) and integrated it with the Descartes MacroPoint™ freight visibility solution. This combined solution aimed to automate manual processes, improve planning and decision-making, and provide real-time visibility into shipments. Descartes Aljex™ helped Freight Scouts save time and resources by automating carrier rate acceptance, dispatching, and EDI, while also enabling better lane pricing choices through historical price comparisons. The cloud-based Descartes MacroPoint™ provided real-time load status updates, replacing manual check calls with automated status updates from carriers every four hours. This real-time visibility allowed Freight Scouts to take corrective actions before potential supply chain disruptions occurred. The seamless integration of Descartes MacroPoint™ with Descartes Aljex™ ensured scalability and supported Freight Scouts' growth and diverse customer base.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
Case Study
Vehicle Fleet Analytics
Organizations frequently implement a maintenance strategy for their fleets of vehicles using a combination of time and usage based maintenance schedules. While effective as a whole, time and usage based schedules do not take into account driving patterns, environmental factors, and sensors currently deployed within the vehicle measuring crank voltage, ignition voltage, and acceleration, all of which have a significant influence on the overall health of the vehicle.In a typical fleet, a large percentage of road calls are related to electrical failure, with battery failure being a common cause. Battery failures result in unmet service agreement levels and costly re-adjustment of scheduled to provide replacement vehicles. To reduce the impact of unplanned maintenance, the transportation logistics company was interested in a trial of C3 Vehicle Fleet Analytics.
Case Study
3M Gains Real-Time Insight with Cloud Solution
The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”
