Simplified tracking for small brokers and owner-ops

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Updated Dec 16, 2018

Previously in this series: For small fleets, tracking can be ELD fringe benefit

Small broker Ana Vetter also runs the one truck in Condor Cargo’s carrier operation, owned by her and her brother Eric Guerra. Using the FreightPrint tracking service, she says, “You’re not really getting into the driver’s business. Once the load is delivered, it ends right there.”Small broker Ana Vetter also runs the one truck in Condor Cargo’s carrier operation, owned by her and her brother Eric Guerra. Using the FreightPrint tracking service, she says, “You’re not really getting into the driver’s business. Once the load is delivered, it ends right there.”

If you’re dealing with direct customers, whether as a broker or a carrier, the FreightPrint company allows you to create unique onetime or recurring movements via its web portal and dispatch the load to drivers using its app. When the load is dispatched, both driver and customer receive a notification. When the driver scans a QR code associated with the load, or enters an ID, tracking begins.

Similar processes occur at delivery and include proof-of-delivery and signature-capture capabilities. Along the way, customers can check in via the web, where they’ll find not an exact pinpoint location on a map of a driver’s phone but a display analogous to the tracking services offered by the U.S. Postal Service, UPS and FedEx: The freight’s last known location shown simply by city and state.

Small broker Ana Vetter of Long Island, New York, lauds FreightPrint for its utility and level of privacy. “You’re not really getting into the driver’s business. Once the load is delivered, it ends right there.”

It also introduces a level of security in knowing the load isn’t going to be double-brokered by someone posing as a carrier over the phone with her, she says.

Vetter also uses the system with her one-truck Condor Cargo fleet, the rig owned and operated by her West Coast-based brother Eric Guerra, to “save the phone calls to know where he is — I don’t have to call him anymore” unless she just wants to check in.

A custom addition FreightPrint developers have provided Vetter is the ability to broadcast a load’s availability to owner-operators and other carriers in her network via the app. She can “do all the negotiation through the app,” says FreightPrint founder Sam Titus. “Carriers can either accept, reject or counter.”

Simplicity guides the company’s design of the service, he adds. Since launch, FreightPrint has focused on adding “more features on a per-request basis.”