Prasad Gollapalli, the founder and CEO of the Trucker Tools app and freight platform, presented something of a roundtable discussion with two owner-operators Thursday at the Mid-America Trucking Show — Greenmiles small fleet owner-operator Shain Ferris of Springfield, Missouri, and owner-operator Tamara Brock, the latter working with LTI Trucking Services out of St. Louis.
Central to the discussion, dubbed “The Battle for Profit,” was just how Trucker Tools and its Smart Capacity and Load Track functionality are attempting to address four key owner-operator and small fleet issues:
Detention
Gollapalli and company studied Trucker Tools’ users’ time spent at shipper and receiver facilitites and found “how long are they staying” in total there – on average, the time was close to four hours, he said, two or three hours beyond the time truckers often give customers to load and unload without compensation for delays.
Owner-operator Brock urged app updates that, for any load booked in the platform, might “automatically track that time, automatically negotiate for us and give us that payment for the time over what’s allowed. That would help with some of the issues.”
Over time, such built-in detention-pay collections might push shippers, receivers and brokers to do what Gollapalli has found is the central issue with detention for carriers: In Trucker Tools surveys, most carriers rank getting the delays to a minimum above getting compensated for them.
One audience member took that further, however, and linked the two priorities inextricably. “I say no detention, period,” she said. “Every time you make a delivery, if you’re giving them two hours, look at all the money we’re giving away. … I’m getting raped, basically.”
Count Ferris among the carriers to endorse a preference to just keep load/unload delays to a minimum. He’s “hoping some of the tools coming into the market now [can] help to collect on detention due or, in preference, just eliminate it. We want punitive rather than compensatory rates for it,” i.e. detention rates that go above and beyond compensating for lost operating time, “but we’d rather not to have to collect detention. I’d love to see no detention in the industry.”
