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Freight quoting and matching – accelerated by the Covid pandemic – has long gone digital, but bulk material haulers seemingly were left behind.
Carriers for years have developed or sought out platforms that ease the process of load quoting and booking for their customers, but the complexities and requirements that come with hauling bulk made automating that process problematic.
"Whether it's from a safety perspective, an operations perspective, there's a lot more checks and puts and takes if you will that goes into executing a bulk load," said Schneider Senior Vice President of Bulk Jason Howe. "It might be the right kind of tanker, the right prep for the tank, air unload, pump unload, how am I gonna get the commodity in or out of the tank? Certainly the safety data sheet – the commodity I'm hauling – what the safety is involved there. There's a complexity that maybe has driven bulk in the past to remain more on the manual side."
There's also the consideration, Howe said, that the makeup of the bulk industry consists largely of private carriers and, beyond the top 10 for-hire players in the space, it "gets really small, really fast."
Schneider (CCJ Top 250, No. 9), one of just a few large carriers with bulk capacity – which it has offered for more than 50 years – launched in August a first-of-its-kind digital marketplace and extending 24/7 visibility to bulk shippers.
Launched in 2020, Schneider's FreightPower marketplace leverages the strength of the company's pool of more than 11,000 trucks and 37,000 trailers to offer shippers access to capacity. To extend digital marketplace capabilities to its bulk customers, Schneider expanded its FreightPower technology and added "a few more steps that a shipper has to take, and a few more questions that they have to answer – or let's say boxes they have to check" Howe said.
