Running to different transporters, carrier operators for a showdown with quotes inflicts deep wounds in subsequent planning and ultimately eats up the supply chain efficiency. For shippers looking to transport smaller and frequent shipments on a tight daily schedule, it is a deadlock scenario wherein shippers anticipate rates and base their following actions on them. As luck would have it, the overly dynamic spot rates only tend to beat their expectations and fluctuate while exposing them to a sea of uncertainty. Hyper fragmentation and a traditionally low level of digitization presented additional challenges to develop comprehensive pricing approaches. Riddled every day with the improbable outcome of this hustle, shippers are relentlessly looking for a complete transformation of the legacy pricing models. They are in search of a reformed pricing model that can assure them of instant quotes/pricing to drive reliability into their operation and the flexibility to select the best commercial lanes.
On the other end of the equation, the complex types of shipments and the lack of pricing standardization have presented most logistics companies with the image of “price-takers.” And the resulting “cost-plus” approach to pricing on the outset has done more harm than any good. Today’s dynamic market requires aggregators and logistics platform companies to provide instant and accurate information. In the form of self-serve tools, the instant pricing mechanism will be all about ease of doing business and upright information.
Research has shown, logistics companies can ideally expect a 2% to 4% revenue boost, meaning an almost 30% to 60% EBIT improvement – if they transform their pricing strategy. We, TruKKer, are never late to catch any bus to transformation, and that’s why we’re introducing MENA’s first and most advanced instant quotes/pricing to customers for most of the lanes. Let’s see how the TruKKer platform is building upon the wave of cutting-edge technology, highlighting a quintessential success factor for engaging with today’s shippers – instant quoting/pricing.
Data science and machine learning (ML) hold the potential to revolutionize the logistics and transport industry by determining the most important factors for the success of a supply network, whilst continuing to learn in the process. Data science and ML have become almost two buzzwords in every other industry looking at its wide-scale implementation from product ideation to bottom line. Plus, digitization also added new momentum to this trend.
That’s why, TruKKer has amassed a considerable amount of data since inception on which the applications can start predicting/learning. At the current stage after around 3.5 years of operations, TruKKer is drawing on its incredible amount of data to build intuitive and expansive models on the TruKKer platform. This allowed us to be the first tech-enabled truck aggregator in the Middle East to provide instant pricing to the customers on most of the lanes.
Be it a domestic movement or a cross-border, pricing for transportation in the middle east is very dynamic. Rather than depending upon the KMs or the time taken for the transaction, it factors in the seasonality, the type of cargo, the loads on a particular lane, weight, time taken to clear a particular type of cargo, client, etc. In this case, TruKKer leverages its proprietary pool of shipping data that it has collated over years of operations to feed and train the algorithms to come up with a pricing. This is currently being done using smart regression algorithms for higher accuracy.
TruKKer uses this algorithm daily to predict the prices for the current date and the future. It is a semi-automatic mechanism as of now where the predicted prices are run daily by the system and then need to be vetted by the operations team of TruKKer. Based on this feedback from the operations, we measure the accuracy of the prediction.
For domestic movements, the accuracy of the algorithm is very high. The main reason for this is because the prices for the domestic movements are stable and change very occasionally if compared with cross border movements. This is where a lot of fluctuations in the market prices take place on a day-to-day basis. We collect the feedback from the operations, and the data sciences team tweaks and improves the algorithms to improve its prediction in real-time. This way, we ensure we’re adding more life to the algorithm with higher accuracy rate and value to the service ecosystem. However, as we keep augmenting our solutions with the industry-best practices our main mission is to introduce first-hand benefits of technology to the entire logistics realm. We’re revolutionizing the freight industry in MENA – one shift at a time.