For-Hire Truckload Carrier Saves $30K a Month with Spireon’s Trailer Management Solution

With FleetLocate by Spireon, Paper Transport relies on trailer telematics data to understand the status of all its trailers.

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Founded in 1990, Paper Transport, Inc. is a Wisconsin-based, for-hire truckload carrier that offers regional truckload, dedicated truckload, intermodal and logistic services. It has multiple park locations/terminals throughout the Midwestern and Southern United States.

Today, Paper Transport employs over 850 professional Class A CDL Truck Drivers along with over 200 driver support professionals. The business focuses on a strategy of growth and innovation in order to aggressively diversify through additional customers product lines.

Executive summary

In the transportation and logistics space, a business is nothing without its drivers. Paper Transport understands this, and every decision they make is to ensure they have happy, qualified drivers. The business prides itself on innovation and wants to partner with technology companies that can help them improve their vision.

With FleetLocate by Spireon, Paper Transport doesn’t have to worry about whether or not a trailer is empty when their drivers show up for pickup, and trailer telematics data is integrated right into tools their team already uses.

Challenges

Paper Transport’s philosophy is “What Drives You?” With this philosophy built into the essence of the business, it’s not just about hauling freight from Point A to Point B, but also about making the company a great place to work with a commitment to safety.

As such, one of the goals and challenges for Paper Transport was getting good, qualified drivers and alleviating pain points surrounding drivers’ frustration of searching for empty trailers. In order to do that, VP maintenance Dan Deppeler and his team needed to create an environment that drivers would get excited about.

“Everyone wants to perform well at their job by doing value-added work, and searching for empty trailers doesn’t add value. For a driver, searching for a trailer actually costs them time and money on their paycheck, so it’s important for PTI to assist them with the search,” says Deppeler.

Without a proper system in place, anytime a driver showed up to a trailer that wasn’t empty, the business was losing over $100 per hour in lost productivity, ultimately resulting in a loss exceeding $30,000 per month. At the end of the day, Deppeler and his team knew they needed an efficient trailer tracking system with cargo sensing to fix their problem.

The solution

Investing in trailer tracking is a long-term commitment that requires the right partner to enhance your business.

“Buying a telematics solution from a third-party technology provider that has the ability work on multiple trailer OEMs makes the most sense for fleets. Solutions exist from wire harness suppliers, but they only focus on their proprietary harness, which becomes a limiter for many fleets. As the trailer becomes smarter, with sensors being added to different components, the trailer tracker provider can start to serve as the communication gateway,” says Deppeler.

After speaking with multiple telematics providers, Paper Transport ultimately decided to partner with Spireon.

“With Spireon’s cargo sensing technology, I can feel confident that trailers are empty and ready when our drivers show up for pickup,” he adds.

Over the years, Spireon’s understanding of Paper Transport’s needs and combined partnership with Paper Transport has allowed us to improve cargo sensor to the 99% accuracy device it is today. The other key factor that led Paper Transport to choose Spireon over other telematics providers was the ability to integrate FleetLocate with their own APIs.

“We wanted to integrate trailer tracking into the tool set that our team was already using. Spireon’s strong API connections in their FleetLocate product allowed us to do just that,” says Deppeler.

As Paper Transport continued to innovate and take their business to the next level, their internal team developed a mapping tool for the operations team that pulls information from Spireon’s FleetLocate.

“By incorporating Spireon’s FleetLocate into our own API tool, our team has greater visibility of freight in the network. We use par levels from Spireon to determine exactly how many trailers are needed at a specific location. FleetLocate also allows us to present trailer data to our own shipping customers for awareness and transparency,” says Deppeler.

Results

Paper Transport has been in partnership with Spireon since 2016. Today, Paper Transport utilizes Spireon’s FL 22+ with IntelliScan on 2,400 trailers. Paper Transport has Fl 22+ on 800 additional trailers and plans on adding the IntelliScan cargo sensor to those trailers as well.

According to Deppeler, “IntelliScan allows us to pull images and see when a trailer is actually empty. Pallets shown, even without product, is a troubling use-case that we can now adjust for. Since IntelliScan uses edge-deployed algorithms, the system can stay flexible long term and avoid the high cost of cloud compute and data acquisition. In the end, our drivers want to know if it’s loaded or empty and where it is, this level of precision helps us solve it.”

It’s also pertinent for businesses to transition from 3G to 4G. While transportation and logistics companies being supplied by Spireon’s competitors are scrambling for new solutions, Paper Transport recently chose to remain with Spireon and upgrade their devices from 3G to 4G.

Spireon’s product, device form factors, ability to integrate with our APIs and option for solar is what keeps us as a customer. Additionally, everyone I’ve encountered at Spireon has been great and very easy to work with,” says Deppeler.

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