{"id":5850,"date":"2018-09-22T03:48:14","date_gmt":"2018-09-22T03:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/?p=5850"},"modified":"2018-09-22T03:48:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-22T03:48:14","slug":"brokers-face-a-more-complex-decision-making-process-when-putting-customers-on-the-rails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/brokers-face-a-more-complex-decision-making-process-when-putting-customers-on-the-rails\/","title":{"rendered":"Brokers face a more complex decision-making process when putting customers on the rails"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As George Abernathy, the chief revenue officer of FreightWaves\u2014and a former president of Transplace, which was represented on the panel by Tom Sanderson, its executive chairman\u2014said, truck traffic that would be \u201coverflow\u201d generally was \u201chanded off to intermodal.\u201d \u201cBut that is not as available today,\u201d he said., said if a shipper wanting to use intermodal had not booked some sort of dedicated rail capacity in the current market, they would be looking at spot rates that are up almost 50% year-on-year.<\/div>\n
The question, though, is whether a shipper that traditionally has been dependent upon truckload movement can be flipped to moving the business to intermodal if a broker seeks to do that. A broker might tell a shipper that they can convert a truckload shipper to rail and \u201csave them a couple of hundred bucks,\u201d but as the discussion on the panel made clear, a switch to the rails shouldn\u2019t be pursued just for that small savings.<\/div>\n
With the recent problems on the rails, even with higher fuel prices and light truck markets, some shippers are moving away from rail and back to trucks. Gore said conversions earlier this year to rail from the road were a \u201cfairly easy sale.\u201d But in the last three months, as rail service stagnated or got worse while trucking rates stabilized\u2014albeit at high levels\u2014transitioning back to the road from the rails was \u201ca little easier for us.\u201dSanderson noted one area where intermodal has a clear advantage: international business, primarily into Mexico.<\/div>\n
The miles traveled are long and getting across the border is a lot easier for a train than a number of trucks. The work of a broker in the intermodal business is far more complex than what that role must do to put a truck on the road. As Menzel said, \u201cmany brokers and third parties today don\u2019t have the knowledge of all the moving parts.\u201d It can become a particular problem when detention and demurrage charges pile up at a rate far greater than one might encounter in the trucking side of the transport. \u201cCustomers like to receive them even less than we like to pass it on,\u201d LaForge said. Any discussion of brokerage inevitably turns to a question: as technology advances, what\u2019s going to become of voice brokers, whether they\u2019re booking intermodal or a straight truckload run? Evan Armstrong, the moderator of the panel and the president of consulting firm Armstrong & Associates, which specializes in work related to brokerage, said all the focus on apps and digital tools that pass the broker are overlooking the possible role of artificial intelligence. And a lot of that AI is already an existing brokerage house and not in the hot startups being funded by Silicon Valley. Armstrong told of one AI developer that is working with mid-sized brokers\u2014he did not identify it by name\u2014that can read unformatted email truck lists and unformatted emails from shippers requesting trucks in certain lanes and can do it to as much as 98% accuracy.<\/div>\n<\/form>\n<\/div>\n

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As George Abernathy, the chief revenue officer of FreightWaves\u2014and a former president of Transplace, which was represented on the panel by Tom Sanderson, its executive chairman\u2014said, truck traffic that would be \u201coverflow\u201d generally was \u201chanded off to intermodal.\u201d \u201cBut that is not as available today,\u201d he said., said if a shipper wanting to use intermodal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5851,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5850"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5853,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions\/5853"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findfreightloads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}