Category: Shippers

How CHEP’s unique pallet data drives sustainability for its partners

This case study was originally published on FreightWaves. If you like this story, you’ll love our other Shipper Testimonials. CHEP’s iconic blue pallet is not just a product offered to customers—it’s also a unique source of data that helps eliminate waste across CHEP’s network of partners, which include most of the largest consumer packaged goods…

Leading Sustainability At Numi Organic Tea With Jane Franch

Absolutely every company in business today has the ability to become more sustainable — it’s an undeniable fact. Organizations can implement basic steps like reducing paper use, incentivizing employees to use public transportation, and switching to LED lighting, or they can take a much deeper dive and look into product sourcing, how their manufacturing processes…

Trends to Watch from Today’s Retail Sales Data

Breaking the trend of recent months, November retail data disappointed while factory output data (released yesterday) generally beat forecasts. The combined data provide a portrait of the freight economy on the eve of the most recent wave of community lockdowns and just before the official start of the holiday shopping season Here are a couple…

MGM Resorts’ VP of Corporate Sustainability Yalmaz Siddiqui: Return on Sustainability

In corporate boardrooms around the world, there are lively debates about sustainability and how much a company’s investment in more sustainable practices will negatively impact its bottom line. Adopting more sustainable practices is mistakenly viewed as a trade-off — something an organization might be forced to do at some point, but without any type of…

Sick of the freight RFP? Here are 3 tools in your RFP toolbox to reduce the hassle

Life doesn’t always go according to plan. And neither do your freight contracts. For decades, the annual freight RFP has been the juggernaut of transportation planning. And yet it’s no secret that the long and painful annual bid rarely works out as planned. Within six months, approximately 50% of all negotiated rates no longer apply. …

What is drop-and-hook freight? 5 common questions answered.

What is “drop-and-hook” freight? “Drop-and-hook” is the trucking industry’s term for when a driver drops a full container at a facility and hooks their tractor to a pre-loaded trailer at the same facility. This grab and go efficiency makes drop-and-hook a win-win: reducing transportation costs for shippers, increasing potential earnings for carriers, and saving time…

Long-Haul Jobs are Driving Trucking’s “Shecession”

Trucking firms continued to add jobs in November according to data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Trucking industry employment increased by 0.9% (12,700 jobs, seasonally adjusted) in November, an accelerating pace from the 0.5% (7,400) pace reported from September to October. Compared to a year ago, truck transportation employment is still…

Case study: Lowering TONU costs with supply chain analytics

Part 1 of our case study showed how Convoy’s digital freight network provided flexible capacity for a customer when demand surged past supply chain forecasts. In part 2, we’ll explore how supply chain analytics uncovered hidden TONU (truck ordered, not used) costs, providing this customer with savings opportunities. Supply chain analytics with a digital freight…

Case study: When demand surges past supply chain forecasts

Business planners put a great deal of effort into demand forecasting for their supply chains. Demand forecasting seeks to predict consumer demand to inform supply chain and business operations. The more accurate the demand forecast, the more efficiently a supply chain operates.  Even in typical business cycles, consumer demand is notoriously difficult to predict. 2020…

How The Retail Industry Is Working To Become More Sustainable

Sustainability impacts all businesses around the globe in some fashion, but when you look at the retail industry in particular, it shares five core environmental sustainability issues: 1) natural resources in the supply chain, 2) environmental impact of products, 3) energy and greenhouse gases, 4) chemicals and toxics, and 5) waste.  While no one company…

Introducing Industry-Leading Drop-and-Hook Innovations

Today we’re excited to announce enhancements to our drop-and-hook service, Convoy Go, that provide customers with more flexible, reliable capacity, superior service levels, and real-time load visibility. Specifically, we’ve added predictive trailer routing, automated reloads with batched routes, and improved smart trailer telematics to our nationwide drop service. The challenge with traditional drop-and-hook has been…

Ushering in a New Era of Drop-and-Hook Through Combinatorial Optimization

In this post, we highlight the complex and innovative combinatorial optimization techniques used by Convoy scientists and engineers to achieve efficiency and scale in what is fast becoming the most popular way for retailers and manufacturers to move truckload freight: drop-and-hook. We’ll explain what drop-and-hook is, why it’s historically presented problems of inefficiency to companies…

March in December — Awaiting the “Parcelpocalypse”

Retail spending took a brief breather in October, slipping slightly on its relentless upward march that began in June. The annual pace of growth in retail sales edged lower to 8.5% compared to 8.8% in September, the first year-over-year deceleration since states began to reopen after the first wave of Covid-19 induced lockdowns. But as…

Mission Possible: Getting More Companies To Make A Larger Investment In Sustainability

Sustainability is no longer that elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. The reality is companies have to make an investment in sustainability in order to have a chance at maintaining market share in their industry. Every day, the world turns a more finely-tuned lens on what businesses are doing to protect people,…

Four Questions About the Outlook for Trucking Industry Employment

Trucking industry employment increased by 0.7% (9,600 jobs, seasonally adjusted) in October according to payroll data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — nearly matching August for the best month for job gains since the start of the pandemic and close to the monthly job gains at the last freight market peak…

Cigna’s Mary Tullis Engvall: Sustainability In Action

As an increasingly larger number of multinational organizations begin to place greater emphasis on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability, the roles, responsibilities, and goals of those in charge of the effort continue to evolve. Whereas leaders in supply chain sustainability may have been siloed early on in an organization, today these practitioners are finding…

Meow Wolf’s Danika Padilla: The Power Of Creativity To Change The World

There is a frequent misconception in business that companies can really only afford to address sustainability issues once they have become profitable. Yet there is a business structure out there, a Certified B Corporation, which actually balances purpose AND profit. Certified B Corporations are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their…