BCB Transport gains revenue per truck through Optimal Dynamics partnership

‘This is an astounding story of a customer surpassing operational targets amid a severe freight recession’

Grace Sharkey

1 year ago

At a time when the trucking industry faces unprecedented challenges, fleet owners find themselves grappling with a scarcity of available loads like never before.

However, amid this shifting landscape, there is a beacon of hope for trucking companies seeking to bolster their revenue and regain their competitive edge. By embracing and implementing cutting-edge technologies, these companies can unlock a multitude of benefits that extend beyond mere survival.

This is why Mansfield, Texas-based BCB Transport announced it has partnered with artificial decision intelligence provider Optimal Dynamics to leverage its technology to automate back-office tasks including load acceptance and dispatching.

Once Optimal Dynamics technology was fully implemented within the company, BCB Transport saw a 19.6% increase in revenue per truck, according to a study on the partnership.

“This is an astounding story of a customer surpassing operational targets amid a severe freight recession. Such quantifiable impacts are unprecedented in trucking. BCB’s commitment to transformation, combined with both of our teams’ extraordinary capabilities, a robust organizational process and a truly differentiated technology enabled this remarkable transformation,” said Daniel Powell, Optimal Dynamics’ chief executive officer.

Change management is key

Rick Larkin, BCB Transport’s chief information officer, has been with the company for more than a decade and in current market conditions, with the available staff on hand, executing everyday decisions while continuing to scale the company had become difficult.

“We move 150 loads per day and dispatch 130 drivers. … To hit the goals we wanted to achieve, manually executing load planning and dispatching decisions was proving to be an uphill battle,” he said in a report on the partnership.

While Optimal Dynamics believed it could improve operations for Larkin, the CIO was hesitant and anxious about the change management.

Powell told FreightWaves that this exact problem is where FreightTech wins or loses.

Implementing AI-driven decision-making into a company’s everyday operations can and should be a difficult adjustment yet one that proves itself in the end. This is why Powell has found, and learned through the work with BCB, that working very closely with your customer to customize the technology and prove the technology’s value can lead to a positive change management experience, and more notably, a return on investment.

“After we worked through some iterations with the [Optimal Dynamics] team we started to realize what a vastly more efficient system it could be,” said Larkin. “After our team built trust in the decisions, our dispatchers are planning 60% more freight in the same amount of time, while even more importantly exceeding our operational efficiency goals.”

After implementing Optimal Dynamics Plan technology — CORE.ai — the BCB team not only saw the gain in revenue per truck but increased mileage per truck by 13% and saw an 83% reduction in driver turnover.

To a greater extent, using the new solution, BCB was able to uncover a chance to eliminate 16% of its tractors while maintaining operational efficiency and revenue gained.

While Larkin was “seriously impressed” with what Optimal Dynamics had helped him uncover, the trucking company is looking forward to implementing the decision software in its bidding operations next.

The Optimal Dynamics team told FreightWaves they learned from the experience as well.

“The No. 1 focus for us is how do you actually implement these technologies from a change management perspective to drive that adoption? The tech is there, the tech is ready and it’s in their systems ready to go. Now let’s work together through these change management issues so that you are really leaning into the change and getting the benefits out of it,” said Scott Kenerly, Optimal Dynamics’ chief operating officer and chief financial officer.