Dothan, Alabama-based AAA Cooper Transportation said it will start offering a free GPS shipment tracking system to its customers starting on July 28.
AAA Cooper is a family-owned less-than-truckload carrier with nearly 3,000 trucks.
Its new system, Action Trac, provides the exact location and continuous visibility of a shipment from the moment of pickup through delivery, the company said.
“We’ve spent millions of dollars investing in the technology infrastructure to increase our productivity,” Lee McMillan, vice president of quality and customer solutions of AAA Cooper, told FreightWaves. “We have that information in our operations and planning systems, so we just had to develop a way to let customers tell us how they wanted to receive the information.”
Shippers can elect to receive a text or email notifying them when a shipment has been picked up, where it is in transit and the approximate time when it will be delivered.
“In today’s world, people wear many hats and the receiving person may have a sales function or the warehouse person may also have an assembly function, so getting a message saying the load will be delivered in 30 minutes would be helpful,” McMillan said.
The technology is linked to the tractor’s engine control module, or ECM, and provides up-to-date information about the status of a load.
Action Trac is “the result of our team’s talents, investment in next-generation information technologies and capacity,” said Charlie Prickett, chief operating officer of AAA Cooper.
“Through this, we continue our commitment to bring solutions to our customers, enhancing their ability to serve their customers,” Prickett said.
The Action Trac technology is available free of charge to AAA Cooper customers.
“We think it’s a valuable tool that the market will embrace,” McMillan said. “Early feedback has been, ‘How quickly can you get this to us, we need it.’”
