Background

Overland Container Transportation Services (OCTS) has been a trusted name in Alberta’s container transportation industry for over three decades.

They began using PortPro in 2022 after struggling with a legacy TMS system that was no longer meeting its needs, resulting in inefficiencies that hindered the company’s growth. Fast forward to today — OCTS is expanding its business and optimizing its dispatch, operations, and billing units.

Internal teams are excited to grow along with PortPro and tap into PortPro’s newest AI-enabled features for dispatching.

Managing a Single Load Used to Take 5 Minutes.
Now it Takes 15 Seconds.

OCTS has 5 dispatchers managing up to 500 loads each day during a typical work week. 
Before PortPro, dispatchers would take all of the information from their legacy system and manually text everything to drivers’ phones. By everything, we mean the container number, pick-up number, weight, and location. 
On average, dispatchers spent 5 minutes per load and about 8 hours each day. 
With PortPro? They’re spending just 15 seconds per load.

What used to take them 8 hours now takes them just 2 hours — which means OCTS is able to move more loads with the same number of people.
Mike’s favorite part is that he’s able to clearly see where any container is at any time. No more calling drivers asking for updates — all the updates are automatically added to his PortPro dashboard.
Now, his dispatch team is less stressed and more motivated. He’s been able to move people around to other parts of his business — and his business is expanding its reach.

No More Texting Drivers for Information

OCTS has 95 drivers. And with PortPro’s driver app, their overall time is cut in half. Because they’re spending less time tracking paperwork, communicating with dispatchers, and figuring out the route.

Instead of remembering to bring a tiny piece of paper back to the carrier, they just snap a picture and upload to the app. Instead of calling the dispatcher for the route, the route is already in their app.

This frees them up to respond quickly to changes in schedules and ultimately take on more loads as the company expands.

Tracking Containers Automatically

Jessica Marshall, CSR Supervisor, is responsible for creating loads, customer profiles, scheduling appointments, rail tracking, and tracing. Her favorite tool is the auto-container tracking. 

Let’s paint the picture for you:

She has 6-7 customer service reps. They each track up to 1,200 containers each day. They’re keeping track of these containers from the minute they leave the shipper to the port or rail, back to OCTS. 

Before PortPro, they did this manually. They had 4 reps who spent 3 hours per day filling up file cabinets with paper trace on each customer. 

Today, they’re spending just 30 minutes per day. 15 minutes at the beginning of the day and 15 minutes at the end of the day.

25% Increase in Cash Flow and $45,000 Less Spend on Detention Fees

OCTS is no longer spending between $700-900 in detention fees each week. That nets out to $45,000 in savings each year.  And invoices are going out faster than ever (complete with all supporting documentation).

Before PortPro, an average invoice would take over a minute to process, including documentation. Now, processing an invoice takes less than 30 seconds.

But the best part might be PortPro’s dashboard, where they can instantly access reports and create new ones as needed. 

Creating reports would often take hours in the old system. Now, it’s a 2-click process. 
Cash flow has also increased significantly. When they started using PortPro in June 2022, they were averaging 58 days receivable. Now? It’s down to just 48 days receivable — representing a 25% increase in cash flow.

Having the ability to pull real-time reports and evaluate KPIs for improvement is helping all of the teams operate at optimal performance levels and be open to new expansion.