BestENews1218

Happy Holidays
BestNow
The official publication of BestTransport, the leader in transportation management
BestTransport.com
DECEMBER 2018
Game
plan
The secret to winning
on the bottom line is
start-to-finish strategy.
Best can deliver it.

PORT OF ENTRY ASK REO: LESS-THAN TRUCKLOAD
The rest of
the LTL story
It’s up to you to help carriers
and dock crews do their job correctly.
A good start to doing this
is knowing how to measure your
density. The formula is length
times height times width, or l x
h x w. Take the total inches from
that calculation and divide it by
1,728 to get the total cubic feet.
Then divide the weight by the
cubic feet to get the pounds per
cubic foot. Voila! Density.
Here’s an example: Say your
shipment is 42 inches long,
48 inches high and 48 inches
wide. That’s 42 x 48 x 48, which
equals 96,768 inches. Divide this
by 1,728 and you get 56 cubic
feet. So if the freight weighs 500
pounds, you divide that amount
by 56 cubic feet and get your
density – 8.9 pounds per cubic
foot. Simple! Use this for your
bill of lading along with your
description, measurements, exact
weight at departure and exact
pounds per cubic feet.
Density minimum charge:
Do you know it? It can increase
your charges up to 211 percent.
Second of two parts
Know your density minimum
of cubic capacity?
The answers to such
seemingly obscure questions
could be a bottom-line key.
Cubic capacity: How about
this one? Know it? Taking up
300 cubic feet could set you back
hundreds of dollars for the shipment
taking up that space.
LTL is changing quickly. Best-
Transport wants to ensure you
are in front of the change and
are proactive in guarding against
increased cost.
Carriers are smart, and they’re
looking out for their companies.
You need to look out for yours.
It’s up to you
to help carriers
and dock crews
do their jobs
correctly. That
means you need
to know how to
measure your
density.
And we can help. Carriers have
new dimensional equipment that
measures by lasers the exact size
of the freight they are handling.
Forklifts can weigh the equipment.
When there are errors in
the reported weight, there are
charges for you. The same goes
for tariff rules. Miss the mark
and you’ll be charged.
We can help. BestTransport
goes beyond the Best software
in the country. Our Professional
Services Group can help you
get the best bang for your every
freight dollar, processing loads
from dock to dock. Our work in
helping you never stops. We ask
constantly how we can do it better.
We review report after report
on rates, lanes, carriers, service
and rules to find every available
advantage.
We never leave you with questions.
Instead, we get answers.
2 best now

OPEN TOP
Freight
fretting
Motor carriers
haul most of the
freight in America,
and they are in a
state of crisis over
capacity. It’s a fact
shippers should
notice and for
which they should
account.
The report is less than sanguine.
Carrier capacity is at
a crisis point, and it’s not
lessening anytime soon, not
based on the widely anticipated
freight forecast released last
month by the American Trucking
Associations.
The trucking trade group
whose forecasts are considered
a bellwether for the industry
predicts that truck tonnage will
hit 16 billion tons this year and
balloon by more than 35 percent
to 21.7 billion tons in 2029.
Truck volumes are projected to
grow 2.3 percent annually from
next year to 2024.
Trucking’s current woes are
expected to linger. Those include
the driver shortage, e-commerce
expansion, regulatory squeezes
and a booming economy.
“[T]his is the tightest truckload
market in this century — maybe
in a generation — and it’s only
going to get worse,” John Schulz,
a veteran trucking correspondent
for Logisitics Management, told
the magazine.
Shippers who account for the
challenges carriers face now and
well into the future have the
best chance of winning on the
bottom line, says Reo Hatfield,
BestTransport’s chief operating
executive. “That’s where we
come in,” he said, “Contact us
today, and we’ll see to it you get
through this.”
december 2018 3

MAIN FRAME
Plan your work
Work your plan
As any good football team knows, the key to winnng
is developing an effective, comprehensive strategy
Paul brown, the football coaching legend
who racked up titles while transforming the
game in the process, knew well planning’s
connection to winning. “Leave as little to
chance as possible,” he advised. “Preparation is the
key to success.” His record spoke volumes in support
of him: He guided the Cleveland Browns to seven
league championships in 10 seasons and first-place
conference finishes every season from 1946 to 1955.
His impact still is felt today. His innovations include
everything from use of the 40-yard dash to evaluate
players to the creation of the passing pocket to
filming practice and games for players and coaches
to study.
Beyond the game, Brown’s cerebral approach carries
widespread implications. Shipping similarly is
about preparation as much as it is freight or bills of
lading. Those who leave nothing to chance have the
4 best now

FIFTH WHEEL
Mandate
impact
still felt
in freight
best chance of winning on the
bottom line. That’s always been
true, but never more so than
today when the challenges are
exponential, from goverment
regulation to yawning gaps between
limited capacity and soaring
demand to wild fluctuations
in the market.
There’s a reason it’s called
transportation management,
after all. Managing
the processes
from
start to finish
requires sharp
planning, constant
preparation
and an
understanding
of the big
picture. This
is where BestTransport comes
in. The company is more than a
supplier of the industry’s leading
transportation management
system. The company is a strategic
partner for its customers.
Check it out
To learn how BestTransport’s
Professional Services
Group can help you
develop a comprehensive
shipping strategy, email
PSG@BestTransport.
Building a plan
It all begins with expertise,
and BestTransport is brimming
with it from all angles of the
freight industry. And no less
important is the company’s approach
to the work.
“We recognize and understand
the value of partnerships,”
said Scott Cummans, president
and CEO of BestTransport. “We
work not only on partnerships
with our customers but also to
develop those same relationships
between them and their
vendors. We are seeking a scenario
in which everyone wins.”
And the company’s depth of
knowledge is an essential facet
of the process.
Best Chief
Operating Executive
Reo
B. Hatfield,
for example,
brings four
decades of experience
in the
trasportation
industry and
a depth of understanding virtually
unrivaled.
“The key to all of it is building
a plan that allows everyone
to succeed,” Hatfield said. “If
we all understand and approach
it that way, we can all realize a
level of success we couldn’t otherwise.
When shippers understand
how carriers operate, and
we understand that uniquely, it
allows them to set up a plan that
ensures a win for everybody.”
And that is the real name of
the game.
much of the cloud associated
with the federal mandate on
truckers to install electronic logging
devices has vanished, but
there are remnants.
Early adopters of electronic
logs were permitted to continue
using existing systems, known as
automatic onboard recording devices,
or AOBRDs, for two more
years. Fleets that chose to take
advantage of that option now face
a deadline to make the switch to
ELDs by the end of next year.
The switch “will probably not
be painless,” Clem Driscoll, president
of research firm C.J. Driscoll
& Associates, said last month at a
conference in Atlanta.
Driven by the ELD mandate,
revenues in trucking telematics
have swelled to $1.1 billion, double
their total since 2015, Driscoll
said. In fact, keeping pace with
demand became a problem leading
up to the requirement kicking
in, according to Driscoll.
One of the big issues will be
in ensuring that the changeover
from AOBRDs to ELDs is carried
off without a hitch, and that
could be a significant challenge.
That does not apply only to carriers,
but to those in the telematics
sector, too. Many of the companies
that have emerged since
the ELD mandate was announced
have failed.
december 2018 5

BACK HAUL PARTING THOUGHTS
BY VINCE CIROLI
'99 to now:
Looking back
More than 20 years ago, when
Rick Frio and I founded Best-
Transport, we believed that shippers
and carriers needed to have
a strong working relationship,
not an adversarial one.
To that end of having mutual respect, we set up
two user interfaces (UI), called BestShippers and
Best Carriers, and together these two UI’s made up
the platform upon which the software sits along with
other modules created over time.
Looking in from the outside, people called us a
SaaS TMS, or a Software as Service Transportation
Management System.
While that was, and is, a quick way to describe us,
we rejected the description as not being correct or
whole.
We have always believed the proper way to describe
BestTransport is a Management System for Transportation.
The software we developed at the start of
BestTransport, and even today, is designed to give
transportation and other managers, the tools and the
help necessary to conduct business and control cost.
The original design was brought about, and even
today continues to evolve, from our working closely
with transportation professionals. In the very beginning,
we had nearly 300 years of in-the-trenches
shipper and carrier experience helping develop our
software and services offering.
We realized from Day One that our software was
just a tool. While our tool took many manual processes
and automated them and saved personnel dollars,
it also produced data – information, if you will – critical
to managing transportation departments to better
financial outcomes.
So our “system” really did not replace personnel. It
redefined the job descriptions in the transportation
department from doing tasks to managing information
and data at a professional level.
As mentioned, professional transportation managers
were critical in our software design. They also
became critical in achieving expected outcomes for
shippers deploying our system.
Today, we call these individuals our Professional
Services Group (PSG). As most of our customers will
tell you, the PSG is our secret sauce in gaining positive
outcomes and helping customers tackle specific
problems and issues, which software alone cannot do.
As many of our longtime customers will tell you, we
started out as an ethinktank.com doing business as
BestTransport.com. The idea was to develop software
and services in a think tank environment that helped
transportation managers solve everyday transportation
problems.
That initial mission has not changed much over
the past 20 years, and we believe now it might be
even more critical as the transportation space evolves
more quickly and dynamically than ever.
To give you an example of this, I’m writing an article
discussing how dynamic time and lane management
is critical in controlling transportation costs going
forward and how to potentially manage time for
better financial outcomes.
I even discuss a new way to look at lane management
that can lower cost for carriers and reduce cost
for shippers as well, an idea 20 years in the making,
if you will.
While much has changed from 1999 to 2019,
much has not. That includes how to solve problems
and issues.
6 best now
J. Scott Cummans
President and CEO
Reo B. Hatfield
Chief Operating Executive
Deborah (Chesnick) Llaneza
Vice President, Professional Services Group
1103 SCHROCK ROAD, SUITE 100, Columbus, OH 43085 | (614) 888-2378 | BestTransport.com