A dry van carrier out of Illinois has officially stepped into a new line of business not typical of a trucking company. GP Transco launched its own transportation management system (TMS) about six years ago; now the company has branched into software, taking its SaaS-based OpenRoad TMS product to market – offering its competitors the key to the company’s success.
When other carriers have visited GP Transco’s office for networking or benchmarking, Sergey Bort, vice president of marketing and strategic business development, said they were always impressed with the TMS.
“A lot of (carriers) are actually using very antiquated tools like Excel for managing their entire operation. Imagine a spreadsheet with 47 different tabs at the bottom that 25 people are editing at the same time, and it's kind of a nightmare,” Bort said. “A TMS that's easy to use can be mind-blowing, especially for the people who are using spreadsheets, and unfortunately, in our industry, even companies our size sometimes are using spreadsheets to run their business. So it's kind of low hanging fruit.”
GP Transco took its TMS to market about six months ago, and it already has a couple hundred users from small- to mid-size carriers – all dry van, though the system can support other sectors.
Bort said the company recently received results from a satisfaction survey it shared with its customers, and satisfaction averaged 4.7 out of 5. He attributed that satisfaction score to the ease of implementation and the system’s ability to integrate easily via API to other disparate services.
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“For the first time ever, they get a centralized hub where they don't have to log into every service separately. Everything feeds into OpenRoad TMS, and they can see all the information,” Bort said. “They can see where their trucks are; they can see TA (locations); they can see fuel prices; they can see their accounting; they can see their payroll and all of that in one place. And that's what customers have really been loving.
