Technology news and briefs for the week of April 23, 2023:
Transflo Wallet offers digital fuel payments
Freight automation company Transflo, a subsidiary of Pegasus-Transtech, and FLEETCOR’s payment processor company Comdata Inc. have jointly developed Transflo Wallet.
The mobile-app-based cardless fuel payment solution leverages Transflo’s mobile app technology and Comdata’s proprietary virtual card capabilities to enable freight brokers to send digital fuel advances to carriers and drivers through a secure and user-friendly mobile app.
The companies joined forces to address the long-standing challenges of conventional payment methods like checks and plastic fuel cards that are inefficient, costly and susceptible to fraud.
The advanced security features of Transflo Wallet protect carriers from fraud and unauthorized access. It also delivers features that enable carriers to streamline their fuel management and reduce their overall fuel expenses.
Samsara helps fleets with sustainable operations
Samsara Inc.’s existing fuel efficiency and electric vehicle offerings are now combined in the IoT company’s new Sustainable Fleet Management solution, providing additional data-driven insights to help fleets along every step of their sustainable operations journeys.
The Sustainable Fleet Management solution introduces several new and enhanced features:
• Fuel & Energy Hub, acting as the one-stop shop for mixed-fuel fleets, including Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), EV and hybrid vehicles, to ensure their drivers and assets perform optimally. This new dashboard helps operations leaders visualize an entire fleet's performance while gathering actionable insights into fuel economy, cost and consumption to direct change.
• Sustainability Report, allowing customers to visualize their fleet emissions and monitor output across sites and vehicles to pinpoint improvement areas. This report also provides insight into current and predicted fleet emissions over time so customers can set more accurate targets and track progress against their sustainability goals.
• Charge Control, combatting driver range anxiety by managing real-time EV charging at scale and easily identifying charging issues. Customers can create custom charging profiles by groups or by individual vehicles and receive notifications for irregularities. Charge Control will be available in open beta this summer.
• EV Suitability Report, providing customers with a tailored list of ICE vehicles within their fleet that are most suitable for EV transition. As an evolution of Samsara’s existing Fleet Electrification Report, this new report now includes assessment for all vehicle types and allows customers to configure electrification criteria for advanced recommendations.
WARP launches new suite of tracking tools
WARP, a tech-powered freight network specializing in middle-mile solutions, has launched a new suite of tracking tools. DirecTrack, gives shippers a high level of visibility of their freight at the truck, pallet and parcel levels, including temperature monitoring.
A shipper typically only receives updates about the whereabouts of its shipment when it leaves a facility and when it arrives (static events). WARP is bringing real-time location updates to the movement of goods throughout the shipment’s entire journey with the interconnected platforms of the DirecTrack suite.
The suite includes real-time temperature monitoring using a small tag that can be applied directly to a box or pallet within a shipment; cross-dock tracking at facilities that partner with WARP and use its software; a driver app that provides shippers with exact location of loads, access to view BOLs and PODs, and statistics, including how long a driver took to complete a route, delays and expected delivery time based on location; electronic logging device integrations through an API integration with TruckerCloud; and final-mile API connections, providing visibility on individual parcels with select last-mile carriers.
Descartes Aljex integrates with FreightWaves TRAC
FreightWaves Trusted Rate Assessment Consortium (TRAC) spot rate data is now available in the Descartes Aljex transportation management system (TMS). This integration provides freight brokers with a single solution to gain an up-to-date view of spot rate data to make more informed rate, bid and freight booking decisions.
FreightWaves TRAC spot rates are used by brokers, carriers and shippers for benchmarking, analyzing, monitoring and forecasting rates. Data is collected daily at the time loads are covered or accepted by carriers using an enhanced methodology that helps eliminate biased data and provide a more accurate lane representation and freight market view.
The scalable, cloud-based Descartes Aljex TMS automates and streamlines daily operations for freight brokers and third-party logistics providers (3PL) to boost efficiency, including order entry, lane rate comparison, load coverage, rate confirmation, carrier acceptance, dispatching and carrier communications. It allows brokerages of all sizes to securely access freight and transportation management data from anywhere.
“The pressure is on transportation organizations to deliver high levels of performance at lower costs,” said Dan Cicerchi, vice president and general manager of transportation management at Descartes. “With the combination of Descartes Aljex and FreightWaves TRAC, our freight broker customers have quality data to give better, smarter and faster price offers to carriers, which optimizes freight booking outcomes on a daily basis and drives greater profitability.”
