This fireside chat recap is from Day 1 of FreightWaves LIVE @HOME.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: The Business of Local Relays
DETAILS: Driver productivity is the simplest method to increase truck capacity.
SPEAKER: Andrew Berberick, co-founder of Baton
BIO: Berberick is an entrepreneur and engineer who has consulted for companies like Google and Facebook. With Baton, his mission is to unlock billions of wasted hours in long-haul trucking in order to bring $150 billion of lost productivity back into the industry.
KEY QUOTES FROM BERBERICK:
“The customers who use Baton will one day never have to send long-haul drivers to warehouses again. The way that we do that is by operating a network of drop zones that we place around major cities and the goal is, instead of a long-haul driver coming in and waiting around for an appointment or getting stuck in traffic or waiting at a warehouse, they can just stage a load at one of our sites outside of the city. Then we operate a network of local drivers to relay the final and first mile so those long-haul drivers are always on the road.”
“You are combining the driver shortage, this demand increase and an inventory shortage and you are painting this picture of a really crazy freight market that is pretty unprecedented.”
“The local driver market is not as constrained. These folks get home every night and get paid by the hour and driver turnover within local fleets is way lower than OTR. It is really OTR that is experiencing the burden of this. … The reality is there are two ways to increase capacity. You can either hire more drivers or you can increase efficiency and get more out of the drivers than you currently are.”
Click here for more articles by Grace Sharkey.
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