Highlights
- While understandably an uncomfortable concept, small freight brokers need each other to survive.
- When brokers utilize UROUTE®, they find efficiency and a better way to connect and interact with truck capacity.
- UROUTE's freight exchange helps brokers compete at a high technical level with big box brokers.
What makes the modern digital freight marketplace relevant and who are the participants? To answer those questions, one must first examine the incredible surge of investment in logistics technology over the past five years. There are two types of investment:
- Allocated capital expenditures from existing logistics providers on technology.
- Private equity investment in new logistics technology looking to disrupt the current logistics landscape.
Both investments share the same goal, that is to streamline or even remove redundancy and manual tasks that motor carriers and freight brokers have experienced for the last 15 years. Add technology, adapt and automate or become irrelevant, that is the landscape taking shape in logistics.
Disruption is the term used when smart technology is applied to legacy businesses that have lagging technology and are ripe for a massive overhaul of fossilized processes and innumerable staffers performing repetitive tasks.
Freight Brokers Must Adapt to Survive and Thrive
Today, big box freight brokers and big data technology companies (acting a lot like 3PLs) are investing millions of dollars to do two things:
- Automate repetitive, time consuming logistics tasks.
- Capture, with the hopes of retaining, illusive truck capacity.
Considering this, in a strange, yet obvious way, smaller freight brokers, need each other to survive and find refuge, as well as relevance, by swimming together. For example, physics proves that fluid interactions help fish in a school swim faster. It is not enough for the fish to just swim together, in order to create efficiency, they must swim with a strong degree of alignment. These aligned movements help the school/group avoid predators AND propel them forward. This concept is intensely applicable for smaller freight brokers as they choose their path forward.
Small(er) freight brokers have much to offer, but they will continue to disappear and deteriorate if they don’t participate in the next freight technology revolution already making land and crashing their shores. This extinction will not happen overnight, but it is happening and will continue to accelerate. UROUTE is tossing smaller brokers a technology life line to make joining this freight technology revolution attainable. UROUTE’s unbiased, uncompromised freight exchange is a virtual safe haven for the brokers looking to leverage today’s technology and create truck stickiness. One and done truck searching is over, it is inefficient and Jurassic. Brokers can rest assured that when they tender freight to a truck, but don't have an immediate reload available, that truck has not left the farm, only the stable.
UROUTE’s Freight Exchange is a Win for All Participants
Smaller trucking companies who make their living off the “spot market” like choice and variety. So much so, they are willing to go the “extra mile” by shopping around through load boards and portal hopping to make sure they’re are securing the best paying opportunities.
UROUTE’s freight exchange has been active for over a decade, this recent change to include brokers on the demand side of the exchange creates a win for all participants. UROUTE’s goal in doing this, and what we believe we have accomplished, is to foster and maintain an environment that trucks want to live in for the long haul.
UROUTE allows shippers and brokers of all sizes to play an integral part in a pure freight exchange, one with an that is impartial, with many participants, vendors and lots of choice. Unbiased and uncompromised.
Are you a broker who not only wants to leverage UROUTE’s digital freight exchange, but could also benefit from a best-in-class TMS? Check out how UROUTE's 3PL TMS can help your business remain relevant and boom!
