FreightWaves is hosting a webinar on Thursday at 11:30 AM with McLeod Software, during which McLeod will launch its new Capacity Creator product. Robert Brothers, Manager of Product Development at McLeod, will present Capacity Creator along with Brian Kelsey, the VP of Operations at ZMac Transportation Solutions. ZMac is a McLeod customer that has been beta-testing Capacity Creator.
FreightWaves interviewed Brothers at the McLeod CFO conference for an upcoming episode of What the Truck?!? (check here on Friday after 2 PM). Robert has held positions in installation, sales, and product management in his 26 years with McLeod Software. He leads a team of software professionals to build and maintain McLeod’s flagship products—LoadMaster and PowerBroker.
“Capacity Creator is a new product that we’re developing to take unstructured email data of available capacity that brokers receive every day in their inbox and turn that into structured data that a broker can act on,” said Brothers.
“So if I’m a carrier salesperson,” continued Brothers, “I get dozens of emails from carriers we work with every day that say ‘I’ve got a truck in Atlanta,’ ‘I’ve got a truck in Dallas,’ and it’s very hard for me to remember. What Capacity Creator does is forward that up to a machine learning algorithm that takes that unstructured data, whether it’s text, a spreadsheet, or a .pdf, and turns it into structured data that automatically matches capacity to your available load list. Now I can be first to act on that capacity in the marketplace and give [the carrier] feedback, and start offering that truck loads. You’ve incentivized the carrier because he sends you something and gets something right back.”
What we find so impressive about Capacity Creator is that not only does it use machine learning to read emails, pull data from them, and integrate them into a broker’s system, it also learns which lanes carriers prefer running in, and considers the desirability of destinations as well as matching origins. The ROI for brokers is pretty clear to us: Capacity Creator’s automation will allow each broker to cover more loads and to stop letting inbound capacity prospects fall through the cracks.
Capacity Creator is a web-based platform powered by Parade.ai, independent from the McLeod TMS.
“It just helps [brokers] cover more loads, more quickly,” said Brothers.
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