- Recently, Convoy announced the nationwide rollout of Automated Reloads — which is a new program for booking multiple loads at a time in order to help carriers earn more and minimize empty miles
Arpan Sinha, the head of product at Convoy, recently announced the company’s nationwide rollout of Automated Reloads — which is a new program for booking multiple loads at a time. This helps carriers earn more and minimize empty miles. Plus it eliminates the time waiting between work.
Through Automated Reloads, Convoy algorithmically evaluates and optimizes how loads can be grouped in real-time all without human intervention. With the Convoy app, carriers can bid their rates or instantly accept these pre-planned combinations of loads as a single job thus ensuring they stay on the road doing what they do best and pull loads and deliver a high-quality level of service.
Convoy’s Automated Reloads
According to The American Transportation Research Institute, over 20% of driven miles are “non-revenue.” And the cost of fuel and other expenses make such deadheading a losing proposition. So most carriers have to contact multiple brokers out of necessity. But working across multiple brokers means trucks are not guaranteed to be full until bids on each load are individually confirmed.
“At Convoy, we are passionate about addressing inefficiencies hindering carriers’ lives,” said Sinha. “With Automated Reloads, our algorithms customize live as well as drop-and-hook packages in real time for each carrier by understanding their unique preferences, hours-of-service and driver locations, wait times at facilities, etc.”
Brokers and dispatchers typically pair shipments that are obvious to spot. However, they miss out on a large part of the opportunity. Due to the complexity and speed of the freight market, real-time algorithmic optimization is ideally set up to minimize empty miles and help carriers.
So by enabling bidding on Automated Reloads, carriers are empowered to be home on their schedule and work at preferred rates thus guaranteeing that they spend less time looking for work or driving empty.
“Automated Reloads brings us closer to the dream of offering “perpetual loads” – where owner operators combine the freedom and flexibility of setting their own schedule, with the predictability of a dedicated contract,” added Convoy Chief Product Officer Ziad Ismail.
Convoy was founded by Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale. Lewis used to be a GM of new shopping experiences at Amazon, a group product manager at Microsoft, and a product manager at Google. And Goodale was a software development manager at Amazon, the CTO of Zendorse, and the CEO of Massively Fun, Inc. In September 2018, Convoy raised $185 million at a valuation of $1 billion.
