Case Study: Sunset Transportation
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unset Transportation is a full-service brokerage and 3PL company headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. “There are only so many minutes in a day and we’re able to make only so many calls,
so we need to make sure that we’re getting value out of those calls,” says John Sutton, Director of Corporate Support. “With TopMatch, we get freight booked more quickly, and that is driving value for us.”
• TopMatch gives us a one-stop shop
that comes with sourcing a carrier. We can be more focused and less scattered. The call list generated by TopMatch gives us that sweet spot where we see the best possible carriers for each load. We’ve learned that we’ll have a much better hit rate from TopMatch than from simply going out to a load board and calling the first carrier who’s posted a truck that’s available within five miles and who is saying that they want to go to Ohio.”
• TopMatch has helped us improve our load-to-carrier ratio and build better relationships with our best carriers
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“Before we had TopMatch, all of our carrier reps had an order of operations by which they went about trying to source a truck. They would try one approach first, another angle second, and so on, using the tools available to them that they thought would give them the highest success rate. TopMatch has allowed us to eliminate that standard order of operations and make carrier sourcing a one-stop shop. Now we can combine different approaches into one search. We can instantly see a list of carriers who satisfy multiple requirements. For example, we can find a carrier that not only has a truck available in the right place at the right time, but also has hauled a load in this lane for us six times in the last thirty days and has a rate on file that fits our needs.”
• TopMatch saves time for carrier reps by creating a focused search
“TopMatch centralizes carrier sourcing within PowerBroker, which means that the carrier reps don’t have to work their way through three different searches. This helps to eliminate much of the noise
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instanty se a lit o cariers who satify multipl
requirements."
“We use a metric that tracks the ratio of loads to carriers. We want to know how many different carriers it takes each month to cover the loads for that month. We break this down by office, team, and individual carrier rep. Our goal is to get the ratio as high as possible because the more loads we can get per carrier, the stronger our relationship is with those carriers we are using. We’ve seen a significant improvement in our load-to-carrier ratio and it’s clear that TopMatch has played a central role here. It has clearly contributed to reducing the ‘one and done’ carriers.”
• TopMatch helps us reduce margin volatility
“In the past we often used load boards to find available trucks,
but that often meant using a carrier we had worked with rarely or not at all. As we’ve used TopMatch to work more with repeat carriers, we’ve detected a strong correlation to more stability with margins. When you use a carrier you’ve used frequently, you can count on getting fair, consistent rates, which allows us in turn to consistently deliver fair rates to our customers. Our experience is that there are carriers out there who will try to exploit certain situations and quote extremely high rates if they think you’re desperate. Working with carriers that we know and trust allows us to get fair rates all of
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