Carriers that use trailer management systems find new ways to cut costs, manage risk
It’s a warm evening in June, and a driver for Pegasus Transportation parks in South Carolina to begin his 10-hour break. At 2 a.m., he gets a call from John Winters, the carrier’s onsite fleet manager, who has just received an alarming text message: The trailer’s refrigeration unit is shut down.
Pegasus Transportation, based in Louisville, Ky., runs a dedicated operation for a customer with extremely temperature-sensitive freight. All 25 reefers assigned to this account must run continuously to maintain a deep freeze.
Winters asks the driver to verify the information. Indeed, the reefer is dead and will not restart. Winters then contacts Thermo King for emergency assistance. The nearest service center is only six miles away, but the driver is off duty and cannot move. While the service center searches for a technician, Winters shares information with Thermo King from the fleet’s refrigerated management system, R:Com, from Blue Tree Systems.
Through the R:Com Website, Thermo King is able to diagnose the problem before the technician arrives. The data reveals a three-way valve likely went out at 1:16 a.m. The technician installs a new valve, and refrigeration is restored within 90 minutes. “We might have lost 6 degrees total, but we were still 9 degrees colder than it had to be,” Winters says.
Pegasus used technology to avoid what could have been a disaster, and the R:Com system paid for itself 50 times over, Winters says. A shutdown is a rare occurrence; the more common risk is when doors are left open for too long. For either event, Winters can see when they occur and their immediate impact on the load’s temperature.
All trailer management systems report time and location, and while this information can be used to target cost-saving opportunities, this capability barely scratches the surface. Carriers also can use technology to determine the condition of their loads, information that in many cases is just as valuable as the freight itself.
Cost-cutting
The number of fleets that use trailer management systems continues to grow slowly but steadily. The technology currently has an overall market penetration of between 10 and 15 percent, and is more common among refrigerated carriers, with as much as 50 percent market penetration.
Dry van carriers were the earliest to adopt the technology as a way to increase cargo security and improve equipment utilization. Brown Trucking, a Southeast dedicated short-haul truckload carrier with about 850 trucks and 3,700 trailers, has used the technology for several years to cut costs, both internally and for its customers.
Brown Trucking prices its services on a variable-cost basis, trailers included. Each trailer has an expected weekly amount of line-haul revenue. Any excess or unused trailers assigned to a customer incur a weekly charge.
“In a situation where customers are charged money, we want to reduce that charge and will work with them to take trailers out of the system if they are not using them,” says Brian Kinsey, president of the Lithonia, Ga.-based carrier.
