S2Q Systems Guest Article – TIA’s 3PL Perspectives February 2023 issue – Automation By Benjamin Derin Founder & CEO, S2Q Systems

Automation is defined as the technique, method, or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means. Automation has become a major topic of conversation over the past 12-24 months, especially in the transportation space. More companies are looking at ways to make operations more efficient and - more importantly – profitable.

The reason why companies are looking to automation is simple. High demand from customers, combined with fewer experienced people in the business, equals more and more tasks per person. Automation can help by eliminating some of these tasks to allow employees to become more efficient and tackle other required tasks.

A lot of companies undertake too much at once and feel like they need to invest in heavy automation to solve everything. This approach typically leads to failed deployments and frustrated employees. A better way to approach automation is to find business problems that are time consuming, but where automation can allow the employee to do their job faster but without the fear of their job being eliminated.

One example would be in scenarios where freight brokers and carriers have heavy email volume from their customers requesting spot quotes. The account rep needs to respond in a timely manner, which involves researching the lane, looking at rates, and typing up a response. While managers would like to ask their people to log accurately all the volume they are encountering, due to the high volume of requests that are coming in, the task just adds to the workload.

At S2Q Systems, we created solutions for carriers and freight brokers to help automate and report a big chunk of these activities but without losing the human interaction. Our two solutions, Speed to Quote™ and Speed to Bid™ help our customers confront challenges in dealing with both email quote requests and spot board bidding.

Speed to Quote™ is an email workflow automation platform that helps companies enhance their ability to quote shipments nationwide in under a few seconds.

Speed to Bid™ helps companies enhance their ability to bid on shipments in under a few seconds by aggregating third party spot freight bidding platforms into one solution.

Both products significantly reduce labor time responding to and managing quotes and bids by automating most of the tedious tasks while also providing vital reporting analytics that can help companies gain insights to their customer base in real time.

An example of these workload issues comes from our customer, V3 Transportation, an expedited transportation service provider. V3 was experiencing significant growth in customer demand throughout its company fleet, logistics brokerage and agent operations, and the company expected the trend to continue. V3 was trying to expand its employee base but kept running into hiring issues for both entry-level and leadership positions, adding to the strain to compete for business and respond to all incoming quote requests.

Mark Dieckhoner, Director of Operations for V3 describes Speed to Quote™ as a game changer for their business. “Speed to Quote™ does two things so well – one of them is speed with our quoting, as it puts the quote together in a very quick and accurate manner. The other is providing deep insight into our customer base; we can see in real time where the demand is coming from and can adjust accordingly.”

While some automation technology and TMS interfaces can take a significant portion of time to deploy, V3’s implementation of the Speed to Quote™ platform was a seamless process, aiding in the company’s success with the product. Speed to Quote™ integrates with multiple email platforms with a short implementation period.

When V3 implemented Speed to Quote™ with one of their experienced dispatch professionals, the tool reduced his labor by 60% working on quote requests, and it increased his sales by 75%. The product also helped shorten the normal window of six months for training to only a few weeks. Speed to Quote™ enabled V3’s new dispatchers to begin quoting in the first few weeks on the job.

V3 Transportation’s utilization of Speed to Quote™ also brought useful reporting analytics to help the company gain insight into their customer base. Dieckhoner describes, “Prior to Speed to Quote™, the only real information that we could extract from how we were interacting and winning from our customer base is what we actually won and put out onto our own trucks or partner carriers. One of the things we always wished we could have visibility into is what we were seeing but not winning.”

S2Q Systems develops and deploys purpose-driven email workflow automation for the transportation and logistics industries. To learn more about Speed to Quote™ and Speed to Bid™, visit www.s2qsystems.com. Demos are available by reaching out to S2Q Systems at sales@s2qsystems.com.