BY STAS MARGARONIS
The harbor trucking business is a tough business. Pick ups and deliveries are complicated by late vessel arrivals, overcapacity at terminals, traffic congestion on freeways and customers who want their containers yesterday.
The situation at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach is especially challenging, because these are the number one and number two ports in the United States.
Dray Alliance, based in Lakewood, California, believes it has the answer for harbor trucking.
The company is a new an on-demand drayage company for import and export shippers and enterprises. It previously partnered with large shippers such as Mattel and global shipping companies CMA CGM Group.
In an interview, Brandon Roberts, a business development manager with Dray Alliance said that the company’s ” pricing model uses AI algorithms to eliminate haggling by standardizing drayage rates.”
As a result, the company’s customer base is growing because its Uber-type App provides a simpler system for shippers and forwarders to transport truckloads to and from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach: “Under our Dray Alliance App there is no dispatcher or middleman. You want the job you can get the job.”
Brandon Roberts
Roberts described how the company has been slowly building up since 2017: “The company vetted a number of drivers checking they had Transport Worker Identification Cards (TWIC), valid truck driving licenses and then the company vetted the drivers via their insurance carriers. This established a pool of drivers who agreed to work with the App developed by Dray Alliance. We then began to build up our customer base with shippers, carriers and freight forwarders. We found that some freight forwarders had contracted with drivers but they did not use them all the time and so they were willing to source their drivers from our owner operator network.”
Roberts says that a key breakthrough has been to reduce driver turn-over which is a serious problem in trucking: “When the customer signs off that we have made their pick up or delivery then we check it and once confirmed make an electronic transfer into the drivers bank account on the same day as the job completion. This means drivers can get paid daily and not wait around for reimbursement. Our driver turnover is low because drivers can see that they get paid and that they have a reliable system of picking up work.”
The driver retention strategy was then supported by increasing the customer base: “we built up a driver base to support the supply side and then the shippers and forwarders for the demand side.”
The result Roberts says is: “We provide a contractual guarantee to our customers that we will deliver their freight and as long as we maintain a good track record business is growing.”