Executive Brief
Doug Smith is the Group General Manager at CJ Logistics Transportation, a full service transportation company providing truckload, dedicated, LTL, drayage, spotting and brokerage operations in major markets across America. They specialize in solutions for regulated industries such as food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, healthcare and medical supplies, and tire and automotive.
Challenge
A little background — we have about 80 tractors operating, and over 100 employees. In the drayage market, we have an asset group operating from Southern California, as well as a brokerage. Both groups use PortPro’s platform. When I started with the company three years ago, everything was managed on spreadsheets. With a manual process came delays, difficulties with visibility, tracking trucks, making appointments at the ports, and more. We were paying tons of money from demurrage and per diem fees. We knew we had to make a change to gain visibility into our entire operation and operate more efficiently. The bonus is the extra time saved that can be applied to other projects. Communication with drivers was always a challenge relying on the driver's cell phone and different dispatchers not necessarily knowing what the other drivers were doing.
I interviewed 17 (I know, it’s crazy!) different companies over the course of 6 months – PortPro was the very first one. All the others did not do what we needed and I came full circle back to PortPro. The majority of them operated from older systems that really didn’t do what we needed for supply chain visibility, and to capture all the information timely and accurately. PortPro checked off all of my boxes – and continues to develop new features like appointment-setting that make our life so much easier.
The Onboarding Process
Onboarding was surprisingly simple. We felt like we were being set up for success. PortPro’s TMS is well done and so well guided. They kept everything in a shared file and provided training and even recordings for later reference. As a result our operators were fully ready to go when we hit the live button. PortPro’s customer service team is always available to help us with ongoing questions and new hire training. In Southern California PortPro helped us train 17 drivers. That process was really quick and efficient. PortPro held a driver training session which took about 30 minutes. Our overall onboarding experience with PortPro was an excellent experience for everyone. Ironically we had another part of our group onboarding a different TMS system at the same time and it was a completely different experience with limited engagement and training.
Results – Biggest Savings to Date
We are saving all the extra money that went out the window from fines, but the biggest savings has been time. On average, we are saving 204 hours per month between back office staff, dispatchers and drivers. It's not only the savings, but it's the opportunity cost that those hours could be applied to something that's going to help grow the business.
There are many other results we are already seeing –
Full transparency into our supply chain and ability to seamlessly run reports.
The ability to have clean data impacts our reporting. PortPro also helped us with our financial data uploads. They were not integrated with our financial system but they built a report for us to import into our ERP, saving us a bunch of time from doing manual manipulation.
We now know that our invoices are accurate and we have the ability to track late payers.
Productivity wise, we have an instant view of what's going on in our driver's day and our own dispatch operation. This helps us to resolve potential conflicts.
Eliminating the administrative costs and adding visibility is a game-changer for us. Plus, PortPro is regularly coming out with new features that make it easier for us to operate and focus on growing our business.
