After crunching your numbers, you decide to submit an aggressive bid to a shipper. The excitement from winning its business gives you confidence that the numbers will work out as planned. Soon after, reality hits. Your numbers begin to crumble when the route takes more time and mileage than planned, drivers idle their engines too much, and toll and fuel prices go up. Days and weeks pass before you realize there is even a problem.

Technology can help trucking companies avoid these and other surprises by capturing detailed records of activities that drive cost and performance. However, making intelligent decisions from all of this data often requires an additional set of tools.

Technology providers have developed applications to maximize the value of capturing so much data throughout operations. Dashboards, scorecards and other analytical tools put both historical and real-time information into context and sharpen the focus on the critical numbers that can be controlled.

Accurate pricing

Time and miles are the building blocks of most measurements used in trucking, but no two miles or hours are the same. A driver may be assigned a 300-mile route that takes the same amount of time to complete as another 150-mile route. Without understanding the unique characteristics of each route, evaluating costs and driver performance is a crapshoot.

Commercial mileage, mapping and routing software systems provide detailed information for calculating accurate cost-per-hour and cost-per-mile measures. Truckload and less-than- truckload operations traditionally have used mileages for truck routes between ZIP codes. Today’s software calculates exact mileages while considering trucking attributes for true point-to-point routing between street addresses.