“We do two things in LTL,” said Nate Wells, senior vice president of operations planning and engineering for XPO Logistics (CCJ Top 250, No. 6). “We sell space and pace.”
Neither of these actions is easy, as explained by Wells and less-than-truckload (LTL) fleet executives from Saia, AAA Cooper, Estes Express and YRC Worldwide during a video call on Tuesday hosted by Optym, a developer of cloud-based transportation management software (TMS) for truckload and LTL carriers.
LTL operations are more complex than truckload since each shipment has to pass through at least two or three locations before reaching the end customer, Wells said. To sell space on a trailer, LTL carriers need accurate information about shipment volume, dimensions and transit times.
Carriers also have a complex planning process for their pickup-and-delivery (P&D) and linehaul routes. Route planning, especially for linehaul, is the biggest opportunity for cost savings, the executives said.
XPO Logistics’ linehaul division runs 2.6 million miles daily and is the carrier’s largest operational spend. “We want to ensure when we are driving that we are doing it in the most meaningful, efficient way [possible],” Wells said.
Getting shipments into trailers efficiently is where XPO Logistics excels with a proprietary application it uses for handhelds. Dock workers scan every shipment and management has real-time visibility for every associate’s daily activities. They receive an alert if a worker has not scanned a pallet in 30 minutes.
The company uses the activity data to create a friendly competition among dock workers. Wells attributes the technology to dock efficiency improvements of between 5% and 20% across its terminal network.
