The freight market is inching toward recovery, and although everyone has a different prediction of when the turnaround will be felt, the industry’s boom-and-bust cycles indicate that recovery is inevitable.
In recent years, the trucking industry has embraced TMS technology due to its ability to provide complete visibility into operations through powerful data insights and streamline processes. This has enabled companies to operate with leaner staff by maximizing outcomes and minimizing effort, helping businesses reallocate manpower and cut spending, which is especially useful in deflated markets.
As the industry recovers, however, keeping a “do more with less” mindset can enhance a company’s growth. At the same time, it will help it prepare for the next downturn. As a carrier’s command center, Ditat provides businesses with the ability to produce business insights to guide critical decisions and optimize workflows through automation, all underscored by its dedicated staff to ensure customer success.
Ditat is a robust TMS that midsize to large carriers and brokers have used to run their businesses through up and down cycles for the past 13 years. Each week, Ditat updates its system or rolls out new features, which are added to provide cost- or time-saving value to customers while being easy to implement and intuitive to use.
Because of the fast-paced nature of the trucking business, carriers need solutions that will allow them access to all of the metrics necessary for their businesses, including visualization of their progress toward their targets.
Ditat allows businesses to easily make their data useful, offering thousands of ways to run reports. This helps businesses target the data that’s most important to their vertical and individual company, such as revenue, fuel purchased and fuel prices, and asset and driver counts, just to scratch the surface. Additionally, through its customized dashboards, companies can make sure users only need to see information that’s important to their job scope.
Since companies base their day-to-day and high-level business decisions on data, correct information is essential. There are many tools within Ditat to help mitigate bad data, including automated features to remove human error and prevent users from entering dates that haven’t occurred yet, for example.
Today, trucking companies generate a vast amount of data, which can quickly become overwhelming. Automation helps a business expedite tasks, increase productivity and reduce the need for back-and-forth between carriers and shippers or brokers. For instance, Ditat can automate dispatch, check calls and even the customer notification of approaching detention time.
Ditat takes care to ensure that each new customer has a seamless transition, ensuring it has all the resources and training necessary to be successful and reap a maximum return on investment.
“Implementation is not one-size-fits-all,” said Eric Williams, director of sales at Ditat. “The customer gets a dedicated implementation representative that’s going to help them through all of their training.”
New users can receive training as new features are rolled out, and they can access their past training sessions in a video library.
As the market slowly recovers, businesses should take advantage of a TMS that can provide businesses with the capability to monitor and visualize their key performance indicators, maximize productivity through automation, and get maximum ROI thanks to dedicated customer success managers. This will help them get ahead of the competition as the market picks up and allow them to endure fluctuations during future downturns.