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 Chief Editor Jason Cannon at [email protected] or 800-633-5953.
Dohrn Transfer Company has multiple initiatives in place – from smart inflation tires to driver gamification that encourages eco-friendly driving practices – to enable the carrier to save 1,400 tons of CO2 annually. But one of its sustainability efforts in particular has led the company down a new path that has resulted in benefits beyond reducing emissions.
The Rock Island, Illinois-based company, which offers both truckload and less-than-truckload services, transitioned to digital delivery receipts in 2022, previously using printed paper copies in duplicate – one copy for the customer and a signature copy for the driver to return to the terminal at the end of the day. But that shift opened a whole other can of worms.
Heather Dohrn, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Dohrn Transfer, said going digital was disruptive to its largest client’s operations. Upon delivery, the driver shows the consignee their tablet, which conveniently eliminates the need to sign multiple documents but can make it challenging for consignees receiving hundreds of shipments per day because it's hard to expose all of the reference information on a tablet display. It also was cumbersome for the drivers when they had to flip through all of the bills to find the description of freight, she said.
Dohrn said she personally called all of the company’s customers that had expressed to drivers that they didn’t want digital delivery receipts to discover the reason behind it and how to overcome it. In some cases, it was simply a novel process that they needed to understand better, but for those receiving multiple deliveries a day it was more challenging. She said it was difficult for them to know how many pieces they were supposed to be checking in for each shipment; they don’t always know what was ordered, who ordered it or where it needs to go in their company.
All that information is now available on a single page, allowing the consignee to check-in the freight from one document.
