On this week’s episode of Check Call, Anshu Prasad, CEO and co-founder of Leaf Logistics, joins FreightWaves host Mary O’Connell to dive into carrier compliance and the role of technology within it.
Key quotes from Prasad:
“At the end of the day, carriers agreeing to do work are driven by if what they’re being asked to do works for them. You can get a false signal by thinking, hey, the carrier is complying. The carrier just might be desperate or really unsure about what next week is going to bring. That’s not a really good healthy signal to kind of bank on for next week or next quarter.”
“When we really think about the carrier’s needs, first and foremost, they’re like small business owners, and they think about the utilization of their truck and the pay for their drivers. Then there’s fuel, tires and somewhere down on the list is how many coffee cups they’re paying out of pocket for. If you can drive utilization and therefore put more money in the pocket of the driver, those are the things we primarily obsess over.”
“The most important thing from a driver’s perspective is being home on a reliable schedule. It’s hard to really quantify how much that would be worth in terms of where to look for reliability or loyalty. We all know the statistics of driver turnover. Leading carriers have the relays invested in that for that reason, so they can kind of get a quality of life for their drivers that others can’t necessarily offer.”
“There’s a lot of stuff that you have to just manually power through today. Then, with a little bit of planning and scheduling, you don’t have to worry about it and drivers can have a reprieve [with a] repeatable and reproducible schedule just like your warehouse shift workers.”
“What if we looked at those continuous moves and said [that] instead of 300 empty miles now, we have 30 empty miles. We’re gonna pay the driver for those 30 empty miles because we want him or her to kind of complete the circuit. For those 270 miles that we took out, every time we run the circuit, I want to create a carbon credit because that carbon credit is super important for me to start banking in 2022. In 2030 someone’s going to come and say how many carbon credits [do] you have to offset your carbon. If I have enough, I’m in great shape. If not, I’m going to buy offsets and offsets cost some money now, but they’re going to be a lot more expensive in the future.”
Got any pain points or things you wish were better in the supply chain and the world of transportation? Contact O’Connell to be on a future episode of Check Call.