CCJ Innovators profiles carriers and fleets that have found innovative ways to overcome trucking’s challenges. If you know a carrier that has displayed innovation, contact CCJ Editor Jason Cannon at jasoncannon@randallreilly.com or 800-633-5953.
Accelerating an already booming consumer trend to buy online, COVID-19 put an increasing number of less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers on home-delivery duties, and online shoppers – spoiled by Amazon’s near real-time visibility into its supply chain – posed a challenge for a trucking industry that largely was beholden to ink and paper and manual bills of lading (BOLs).
Having first launched its own shipment processing system technology almost 30 years ago, Southeastern Freight Lines (SEFL) upgrades it on an ongoing basis to meet market demands. And in the throes of a pandemic, the market was demanding more digitization.
SEFL (CCJ Top 250, No. 30) as of this year digitally scans its BOLs, said Woody Lovelace, the company’s senior vice president and chief information officer. “Not only does that gather more information about the details of that shipment earlier, [but also] the sooner that we know all the parties of that freight bill, the sooner we can start providing customers with visibility,” he said.
That data is fed automatically to the carrier’s dock operations, and “as drivers come back off the street, based on the details of that load,” Lovelace said, “we can make door suggestions that limits the space or reduces the distances between the unload door and the load door.”
The platform also has enabled 99.6% invoice accuracy, as all that data feeds back into a centralized billing location.
Lovelace said the electronic pickup (ePup) and delivery (ePod) process has removed more than 10 million pieces of paper out of SEFL’s operations. “Not only are you printing them, but you’re handling them, you’re filing them and you’re scanning them, and all the things that go along with that,” he said. “With moving into COVID, it positioned us perfectly to do a contactless delivery. The customer doesn’t have to touch a piece of paper. They don’t have to touch a handheld. In fact, they don’t even have to be there. We take a photo of where we leave the shipment. We automatically send that proof of delivery to them immediately.”
