Has there ever been a time when the freight industry hasn’t had to battle capacity constraints and needless volatility? A luxury like that hasn’t been experienced in decades, and if things continue as they have, that will always be the case. We’ve discussed how stakeholders have been increasing their demands for sustainability practices and how sustainability can help with the ongoing labor shortage, but what about alleviating capacity constraints? We believe the right digital freight technologies can help both shippers and carriers alike make better use of their assets to simultaneously address capacity constraints while achieving their sustainability goals. Let’s dig in.

Why embrace technology

There’s no doubt about it. We need to find new efficiencies to do more with what we already have. As CEO and founder at Overhaul Group shared on Inbound Logistics, “Companies will need to make the most of the capacity they have by keeping a close eye on asset utilization and prioritizing shipments.” The 2021 Gartner® Report: Apply Technology to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Logistics recommends organizations “Identify the technologies that will help them reduce their carbon footprint through an investment in transportation applications and intelligent things.” We couldn’t agree more. SemiCab founder, Ajesh Kapoor explains, “We’re fast approaching the point of no return, and our environment can no longer be ignored; focusing on sustainability isn’t a perk, it’s a necessity.”

How will technology help? For starters, a variety of new technology out there is based on the principle of offering more visibility, which is “now accepted as a strategic way to drive increased efficiency and utilization, and add capacity.”

According to the 2021 Gartner® Report: Apply Technology to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Logistics, “Providing visibility is a core part of supply chain technology, and it plays a complementary function that supports different supply chain functions, such as transportation management, warehouse management, yard management and fleet management. It allows logistics leaders insights into what is happening in the organization as well as outside their organization to control end-to-end processes. These solutions can also provide valuable insights in the carbon footprints of the shippers and highlight areas where carbon emissions can be reduced.”

SemiCab believes improved visibility enables us to work together as an industry to reduce carbon emissions, eliminate empty miles, and achieve improved efficiencies. To create visibility, the SemiCab Collaborative Transportation Platform gathers real-time data with an API-based foundation in conjunction with pre-built integrations with TMS solutions and ELD partners. The platform uses this visibility data to create fully loaded trips for all. And as we all know, the more loaded a trip is, the fewer empty miles there are, which directly translates to less carbon emissions.

According to SemiCab founder, Ajesh Kapoor, “To date, many attempts have been made to utilize technology to eliminate empty miles from the trucking industry, but these attempts have been primarily focused on market-price based automated matching of individual point-to-point spot loads, not on overall network efficiency. SemiCab’s Collaborative Transportation Platform is focused on connecting multiple shippers, including those in the e-commerce/retail sector, in order to reduce empty miles.”

The Gartner Apply Technology to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Logistics report also states, “In most cases, the truck driver transports a full import container from the port to the customer and drives back empty to the port. By triangulating street turns, the trucker finds an export shipment ready for pickup before taking an empty trip back. Hence, empty miles are reduced and carbon emissions decrease, leading to millions of dollars in total savings.”

With improved visibility, shippers and carriers will always know where their shipments stand and what needs to be done to ensure they always reach their targets. And by utilizing all assets for head-and-backhaul, creating more efficient roundtrips, shippers pay less and carriers make more. This is only possible because of the wealth of technological advancements that have been made in the last few years.

How SemiCab Fits In

We believe that employing digital freight technologies that are relational (not transactional) is the key to addressing capacity constraints. With a Collaborative Transportation Platform (CTP) like SemiCab, shippers and carriers have access to all the benefits of a dedicated fleet—quality, service levels, stable pricing—with the flexibility of a one-way lane-based model. This makes collaborative freight optimization possible. SemiCab uses robust AI/ML and Predictive Optimization™ technologies to look at the entire demand and supply picture in the network and optimize the freight for all stakeholders holistically.

While most shippers don’t have the resources in place to secure executable backhaul freight that meets their needs, SemiCab does. Matching the equipment, weight, volume, location, and HOS constraints to find optimal opportunities is a simple task for our optimization engine; we crunch through thousands of constraints and loads to find the optimal match every single time.

This is only a sampling of what The Gartner Apply Technology to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Logistics report covers. Download the report today, or for more details on how SemiCab can help your business thrive, or reach out for a demo with one of our executives.

Gartner, Apply Technology to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Logistics, Bart De Muynck, 3 June 2021.

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