AxleHire is beefing up its East Coast presence. The last-mile delivery provider on Wednesday announced it was adding facilities in Newark, New Jersey, and Philadelphia to join its New York City center in the tri-state region. The news comes on the heels of the company’s Midwest expansion and the opening of its new Chicago facility in June. It now has 12 centers that cover the East Coast, the Midwest, the Southwest and up and down the West Coast.
“The tristate corridor is the logistics vein of the East Coast, and we’re eager to offer both current and new clients a superior delivery experience for their customers,” said AxleHire CEO Adam Bryant.
AxleHire offers clients 99% on-time delivery rates as well as real-time tracking and SMS communications to provide visibility over the last mile. The company’s in-house technology utilizes algorithms to optimize delivery routes based on variable demand, delivering more packages with fewer vehicles, and each of its sortation centers is equipped with hardware and scanning components that run on that back-end tech.
Going coast to coast
For AxleHire, the East Coast expansion is perhaps its most important one yet, as the company now boasts a major presence on both coasts. Now, clients can use one service to manage operations across the country.
“It gives us a stronger foothold into being able to go to a customer and say, ‘Hey, we’re basically a national regional carrier,’” founder Daniel Sokolovsky told Modern Shipper. “Right now, customers are shipping to what they believe to be their most important clientele. That’s mainly on the coasts, right? So having New York, LA, San Francisco and our other markets covers quite a bit of the e-commerce orders.”
Sokolovsky says the nucleus of AxleHire’s logistics network is its back-end technology, which he describes as a “digital skeleton” that gives the company a transferable digital infrastructure between its sortation centers. The tech bases its decisions on different driver and vehicle pools, and it handles much of AxleHire’s operations behind the scenes.
“A lot of the technology is actually in the back end and invisible to anybody’s eyes,” Sokolovsky explained. “And that technology, what it’s doing is everything from order intake to routing, address verification to fleet logic.”
Sokolovsky compares that “digital skeleton” to having an electric engine instead of an internal combustion engine. In his analogy, an electric engine has four motors, which are like AxleHire’s sortation centers. The four electric motors power the tires of the car directly so that no excess energy is wasted transferring torque from the engine to the wheels, much like AxleHire’s back-end tech is built into its facilities.
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Continuing the analogy, each motor is also connected to a single mainframe, so that when something goes wrong with one motor, Sokolovsky says, it’s easier to fix the entire engine. It also makes it easier for the company to extend innovations from one facility to the entire network.
“Like, look at Tesla enabling things like Ludicrous Mode and stuff like that,” Sokolovsky said, referring to the acceleration boosting setting on the automaker’s vehicles. “And they’re able to do that with something as simple as a software update, whereas with a traditional auto manufacturer, you’d have to go into their shop, spend thousands of dollars on parts and labor, and then maybe have a result that’s similar.”
Moving forward, Sokolovsky says AxleHire plans to electrify its fleet, in line with President Joe Biden’s national goal of automobile electrification. The company is also planning two more expansions into Atlanta and Miami for 2022 and has one more big venture in store.
“As we continue to update and enhance our technology and our technology features, we’re currently building out a big [delivery service partner] network across the country,” Sokolovsky told Modern Shipper. “We’re kind of trying to imitate Amazon’s DSP capabilities, and how they’ve been able to successfully grow and leverage the delivery service providers to be able to be a major part of their delivery fleet.”
Sokolovsky is excited about what AxleHire’s expanded East Coast presence, along with its upcoming plans for sustainability and growth, means for the company.
“I think, really, we’re coming out of the woodwork as the visually enabled carrier. And for a lot of people, that means a lot of different things,” he said. “I think, for me, what it means is we’re able to grow much quicker than our competition, and we can eventually grow to be much bigger than our competition.”
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