Transflo is known widely throughout the trucking industry for imaging, scanning and digital document management, but those are just its baseline offerings.
Transflo Vice President of Product and Innovation Doug Schrier expanded on the company’s reimagining of transportation software with FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller on the FreightWavesTV show, “Fuller Speed Ahead.”
“We pride ourselves on solving our customers’ problems,” Schrier said. “There’s not a problem that we’re not willing to step in and help solve.”
Tampa, Florida-based Transflo provides technology solutions for fleets, drivers, brokers and 3PLs alike. Its services include document management, electronic logging device (ELD) and telematics, and driver solutions, among others. Transflo provides business process consulting and back-office efficiency programs as well.
“A large percentage of the industry’s documents come through our system and are training the machines that we’re using to process and extract that data off of [them],” Schrier said. “There’s likely not an image that we’ve not seen before, which helps us automate it.”
According to Transflo, the company’s mobile and cloud-based technologies digitize over 400 million shipping documents each year, representing nearly $40 billion in freight bills.
“In the last 10 years, we’ve really evolved from a company that was mostly processing paper [documents] to digital into being the number one mobile app within the industry, launching new products for our brokers and carriers, installing ELD into our mobile app and having a full mobile ecosystem to be ELD compliant,” Schrier said.
Transflo has evolved its imaging solutions services since its founding in 1991. One of its first innovations was Transflo Express. Launched in 2002, the service provides drivers with documentation scanning at truck stops around the U.S., which Transflo states is still the leading truck stop and on-demand document solution in the market today.
But Schrier noted that Transflo has always strived to remain at the crest of the technology wave.
“We were really focused as a small company 10 years ago doing what we were good at, which was document imaging and helping accelerate back-office [processes],” he said. “We saw that [mobile technology] train coming, and frankly, it was going to hit us.”
Transflo has since expanded its offerings to include ELDs and telematics as well as mobile driver solutions and other services. All of Transflo’s services can be accessed via its smartphone apps.
The Transflo Mobile+ app offers complete trucking solutions for drivers. The app features on-the-go documentation scanning, load review and acceptance, navigation designed specifically for trucking routes, two-way messaging with your fleet or broker, and much more.
It can also log hours of service (HOS) for drivers with Transflo’s T-Series ELD device. Schrier said Transflo’s ELD is patented with some of the richest data available on the market and takes only about five minutes to install.
Transflo provides an HOS-specific app as well.
“We’re already at the point where it is just a mobile application,” Schrier said. “You plug a piece of hardware into your truck and run it on your phone or a company-provided tablet.”
With the launch of its Mobile+ app, Transflo has set its trajectory on becoming the ultimate technology solution provider. But Schrier mentioned “app fatigue” as a legitimate concern. Many are loath to download a plethora of transportation apps to conduct business.
“People aren’t willing to adopt someone else’s technology,” Schrier said. “I don’t want to have 12 different brokers’ apps on my phone in order to do my job. I want just one.”
Fuller added, “I think oftentimes people that work for the freight companies are not good at building applications. That is why there’s this massive ecosystem of technology companies to service it. It’s not easy to build an app that people want to use.”
Transflo, however, has historically been an early adopter of the latest technologies. Successful transportation apps are formulated when “tribal knowledge” combines with tech. Schrier joined Transflo with an extensive background with Covenant Transportation. Coming from the trucking side of the industry, he said he viewed everything as a project. Translating to the tech side, he sees the Mobile+ app as a “continuous reinvestment” to always be improved.
Schrier believes the Mobile+ app is perfect for drivers who want to perform all of their daily work on one simple platform. He added that he hears drivers use the company’s name as a verb referring to the work they do through the app, saying, “I Transflo.”
“We really pride ourselves on [customers] being able to trust us,” Schrier said. “Whether it’s the amount of uptime we have or our overall approach to the technology and the data, we want people to trust us and to maximize their value.”
