The transportation side of the logistics industry has long remained at arm’s length from the waves of digitalization sweeping across other business functions. It’s not that industry players are averse to the idea of digitalization—the use of digital technologies to overhaul business processes. It’s just that it seems like a stretch. After all, how much help can apps and laptops offer when your job is loading boxes into a trailer and hauling them hundreds of miles down a highway?
As it turns out, the answer is quite a lot. While no one has yet figured out how to digitalize the lifting, loading, and hauling part of the equation, the tech wizards have found a number of ways to automate processes that take place behind the scenes: appointment scheduling, document exchange, tracking and tracing, and the like. As a result of their efforts, players in the freight trucking sector now have access to a new generation of technology solutions that are helping them streamline workflows, achieve quicker turnarounds, and obtain better visibility into their operations.
What follows is a look at how several companies are harnessing the power of digitalization and what one industry organization is doing to support those efforts.
EASING THE LOAD WITH AI
To see the kinds of benefits digitalization can bring, you need look no farther than Axle Logistics, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based freight brokerage and transportation management service provider. In a bid to re-engineer and automate its freight appointment scheduling process, the company last month implemented an AI (artificial intelligence)-enabled system from tech developer Qued Inc.as part of its transportation planning and execution platform.
In the past, appointment scheduling had been a heavily manual activity involving tedious repetitive tasks—accepting tenders; planning, building, and scheduling loads; and then securing appointments for those loads—a process that often required multiple texts, emails, and phone calls, Axle President Shawn McLeod said in a release. An initial evaluation by the company indicated that implementing Qued’s AI-based software solution had the potential to significantly improve and streamline its scheduling workflow.
Those assumptions proved correct: Although Axle is still in the early stages of its ramp-up with Qued, the solution has already eliminated many of those manual tasks and significantly reduced the amount of time needed to schedule an appointment, McLeod reports. On top of that, he says, the new software has improved employee productivity, reduced the errors that often accompany manual work, and freed up staff time for more value-added or complex tasks.
Another company that has chosen the digitalization route is Hirschbach Motor Lines, a Dubuque, Iowa-based fleet that describes itself as the second-largest refrigerated carrier in North America. The carrier announced in February that it had adopted an AI-based platform from New York tech firm Hyperscience as a key component in its digital transformation initiative.
The trucking company will use its new technology to automate the processing of the 2.5 million or so documents it handles every year, which include bills of lading, carrier invoices, fuel receipts, inspection reports, and trip sheets. Once it’s up and running, the Hyperscience platform will extract data from all of those documents and convert it into a machine-readable format, according to the tech company. After it’s been validated, the data will flow seamlessly into downstream billing and operational systems.
“The logistics and transportation industry is complex, abundant in data, and brimming with opportunities to revolutionize how business is done,” Ivan Ramirez, CTO at Hirschbach, said in a release. “Efficient document processing is critical to optimizing operations, ensuring timely delivery and billing, streamlining workflows, reducing errors, and accelerating decision-making, ultimately leading to a better experience for both customers and drivers.”
FROM “DUMB BOX” TO “SMART TRAILER”
In addition to streamlining paperwork, the rising tide of digitalization in freight has extended to physical assets. One example is the trailers-as-a-service (TaaS) offering launched about two years ago by the Lafayette, Indiana-based transportation equipment provider Wabash National Corp. The company’s Wabash Marketplace service, which is offered on a subscription basis to customers like shippers, 3PLs (third-party logistics service providers), and motor carriers, provides trailer capacity on demand, offering users a scalable option for handling the overflow during peak periods.
Trailer pools are nothing new to the industry, but this one is different, according to Wabash. What distinguishes it from the rest is that Wabash is using “smart trailers” loaded with sensors that collect and share data on their location, tire inflation levels, operating condition, door openings, and more, enabling better fleet monitoring and proactive maintenance. Wabash then crunches the data to provide analysis and insights to its customers, allowing them to run faster and more efficient routes.
That suite of built-in sensors “makes the trailer go from being a dumb box to a smart asset,” says Brion St Amour, senior director of commercial, Wabash Marketplace. With that foundation in place, Wabash is scaling up its pool of units from about 1,000 smart trailers today to more than 3,500 by the end of 2025, he adds.
LET YOUR COMPUTERS DO THE TALKING
In the meantime, a prominent industry organization has joined the digitalization cause. Though it’s perhaps best known as a standards-setting body, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA) has also been developing technology to facilitate automated communications among shippers, carriers, and third parties. To be specific, it’s been working to create a protocol that allows computers to exchange freight data directly, eliminating the need for humans to handle the task via phone calls and emails.
Those efforts came to fruition about two and a half years ago when the NMFTA’s Digital LTL Council—a coalition of less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers, shippers, 3PLs, and tech developers—unveiled an API (application programming interface) standard designed to streamline the exchange of electronic bills of lading (eBOLs). The new standard quickly gained traction with carriers, logistics service providers (LSPs), and shippers, who found that it reduced their costs and errors and improved overall communication and service, says Keith Peterson, director of operations at NMFTA.
Buoyed by that success, the Digital LTL Council recently released a second API, its “Pickup and Visibility” offering, which is designed to standardize communications regarding pickup requests and the status of a requested pickup. And there’s more to come, according to Peterson. He says the group will soon launch four more APIs, which will address preliminary freight charges, in-transit visibility, invoicing and rate disputes, and rate quotes and cargo claims.
The effort is now expanding beyond the LTL sector. In late December, NMFTA announced plans to roll out a similar series of APIs through its newly formed Digital Full Truckload Council. Those new APIs will complement the work done by another standards-setting body, the Scheduling Standards Consortium (SSC), which was formed in 2022 to simplify the integration of systems used by shippers, truckload carriers, and intermediaries and create a more efficient appointment scheduling process, Peterson says.
Despite the industry’s initial skepticism, it seems that digitalization can indeed be applied to one of the most purely physical links in the supply chain—moving heavy boxes from point A to point B. And as the new generation of digital tools continues to expand, logistics partners at every node of the network stand to realize benefits such as time and labor savings, increased accuracy, quicker turnover of trucks and trailers, and faster delivery of loads to their final destination.
