McLeod Software, a provider of transportation management software for the trucking and brokerage industry, is introducing the newest version of its PowerBroker II software April 8-9 during the Transportation Intermediaries Association’s 32nd Annual Convention in Tucson, Ariz. This semiannual release of McLeod Software’s brokerage software is geared toward giving brokerage and logistics firms more advanced performance and revenue analysis tools. These new business advancement tools will be demonstrated on the tradeshow floor during the exhibition portion of the TIA convention.
“Providing our brokerage and logistics customers the tools to help them work efficiently and make informed decisions quickly regarding their business operations is critical in an intensely competitive marketplace,” says Tom McLeod, president and chief executive officer of McLeod Software. “Our goal is to offer our customers effective business tools such as these in every new version we develop. To be competitive in today’s challenging marketplace, brokers must know moment to moment what is happening in their operation; how it will affect their costs, revenue and profit; and how they can adjust to change a negative revenue trend – right now. It’s our job to put the tools in their hands to give them that ability and to offer them the greatest opportunity for success in the marketplace.”
A key component of the release is a new Brokerage Performance Command tool added to Brokerage Planning to permit brokers to not only see how their business is performing today but how that performance trend, if continued, may affect the operation over the next few days. A quick view of key performance indicators – including movement count, revenue and profit information, broken down by movement status by the day, the past three days and forecasted for the next three days – allows critical adjustments to be made to keep revenue and profit levels on track.
Additional Brokerage Planning features include a new Profile function, which allows users to drill down into the Brokerage Planning information by dispatcher, salesperson or freight lane. A new PNN (Private Notification Network) Available Orders Report offers a brokerage firm the option to include its logo/company image as well as additional comments with the outgoing e-mail/fax to carriers to both brand and improve its communications.
An Inbound/Outbound Lane Analysis Report helps brokers visualize geographically their business’ traffic flow so they can track with accuracy where the majority of their orders, revenue and billed miles come from and move to. The report provides a summary chart and map to show freight lane revenue by origin and destination states or by configurable three-digit ZIP code (market area) ranges. Inbound and outbound orders can be reviewed by number of orders, total revenue, billed miles and loaded miles.
A new tool, the Field Marshal, helps customers adjust and structure their system to better fit their individual businesses while maintaining the supportability of their software investment and giving them the ability to take advantage of future upgrades. The Field Marshal Manager enables a qualified system administrator to add new custom fields to screens, change the behavior of existing fields, add new tab sets to screens and change the tab sequencing of fields on the screen. It is designed so that all customization made using this advanced new tool will migrate from one version to the next during a software version upgrade.
The new Data Import tool allows customers to import data into their transportation systems from Excel spreadsheets much easier, faster and more accurately via a profile that maps the spreadsheet format to their PowerBroker data file layouts; all imported data is verified against the system’s field requirements rules. And the integration of McLeod’s Rapid Alert Notification System with its Report Scheduler system improves communication within a customer’s team by delivering reports to users for instant viewing via their Rapid Alert messaging window.
