freight they’ve bid. Automating contract and RFP pricing is arguably a more ambitious, difficult project than real-time price discovery, and we think that it can do a lot to make small and medium-sized freight brokerages more competitive.
Business process automation through McLeod’s FlowLogix offering should also add incremental productivity and drive process uniformity in mid-tier freight brokerages.
One product whose
launch was announced at this meeting especially reminded us of a digital brokerage- style piece of technology. McLeod calls it the Driver Choice module. In essence, Driver Choice allows truck drivers to participate in load selection and update their lane preference profiles on the fly. McLeod pointed out that one month a driver may want to stay out two weeks at a time and use long-haul loads to maximize his revenue, while the next month he may have an issue at home and prefers regional lengths of haul. Driver Choice allows him to set those parameters, be shown loads that conform to his preferences, and choose among them.
Driver Choice seems especially suited for asset-light leased operator business models where a brokerage manages a pool of owner-operators. Defending that business model is hard, because the cost of switching to a new brokerage or dispatch service is insignificant.
McLeod Software believes that by pushing data and the benefits of machine learning — algorithms, after all, are finding the loads that meet the driver’s criteria — down to the driver, it empowers the driver and makes the brokerage’s operation stickier.
McLeod’s TopMatch product is another characteristic piece of digital brokerage technology: it looks at external capacity indicators and the capacity of carriers a brokerage has done
business with to find the carrier most likely to take any given load.
“One
individual in an operation can be covering multiple loads at the same time on an automated basis,” McLeod said.
Other topics
covered in McLeod’s presentation included autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, and IQ, McLeod Software’s business intelligence product.
But again and again, I was struck by the similarities between the products McLeod is offering its customers and the platforms that have required hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital to build. McLeod is thoughtfully designing software solutions — in some cases bit by bit as it adds code to its platform — that will keep its customers competitive for years to come.
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