Greatwide has developed a software interface to link its fleet dispatch system to “outside” dispatch packages that shippers use to operate their private trucking fleets.
By 2000, Transport Industries had grown to become one of the largest transportation companies within the market it had established – dedicated, “closed loop” transportation services to the grocery industry.
In 2000, investment firm Fenway Partners acquired Transport Industries and launched Greatwide Logistics Services. Since then, Dallas-based Greatwide has become one of the largest logistics and transportation companies in the nation through a series of acquisitions. In 2006, the company employed about 3,500 owner-operators and 1,000 company drivers, and revenues exceeded $1 billion.
While its name has changed, Transport Industries continues to exist as a separate business unit within Greatwide under the Greatwide Dedicated Transport name. The business unit is the largest of the four Greatwide units from a revenue standpoint, says Mike Voelk, the company’s vice president of information technology.
For Greatwide’s next stage of growth, the company is preparing to launch a new technology-driven business model for dedicated transportation services. A major component in this model is a software interface that Greatwide has developed to link its fleet dispatch system to “outside” dispatch packages that shippers use to operate their private trucking fleets. The software interface enables Greatwide to provide its customers with visibility of Greatwide trucks and to make optimal load assignments and routing decisions for all assets in the system.
Preparing to launch
With these core technologies in place, Greatwide in December 2006 entered into an agreement to manage a fleet of owner-operators for a major Fortune 500 company food producer. This company had added the owner-operator division from an acquisition and was looking for an owner-operator management arm separate from the large private truck fleet it operates. As part of the agreement with Greatwide, the owner-operators – now leased to Greatwide – use the client’s trailers and are dispatched centrally from the client’s dispatch software. The client uses its own power-to-load optimization system to assign freight to its own private fleet as well as the owner-operators.
“Our owner-operators are automatically added to the system using an interface,” Voelk says. “Our capacity is considered equal from a load assignment and time-at-home perspective.” Driver settlement and billing is supported through a load information interface from the client to a third party that scans and indexes electronic images of load receipts and provides a daily file to Greatwide’s Web-based system. The client then can review and audit load charges through the Web using Greatwide’s software. Greatwide then completes the auditing, billing and driver settlement process.
