Director of Strategic Accounts Patrick Spence talked to us about implementing Greenscreens at Southland Transportation Company. Patrick has 20+ years in the freight industry. His specialties at Southland are AI implementation and data analytics strategies.
When Southland signed on with Greenscreens, it was Patrick’s job to get the new tools implemented throughout the company, with the ultimate goals of developing new lanes, increasing load count, mitigating competitive fallout, and maximizing rates for their assets.
Software adoption can be a big project, no joke. It means not only getting everyone trained on the new tools but making sure they actually use them, and in the most effective way. We’ve all seen how inertia and resistance to change can hinder innovation and slow down user adoption of new technologies.
Luckily, Patrick Spence and Southland Transportation Company had a plan.
The Winning Formula
Instead of starting with a company-wide rollout, Southland decided to implement Greenscreens first at their lowest-volume office. The small staff gave them plenty of time for training and allowed the implementation team to spend time with users, answer questions, and find the best ways to integrate Greenscreens with their workflow. Company leaders could see if Greenscreens worked for Southland without committing to a giant rollout – and it definitely did work. It worked very, very well, simply because it provided more accurate and effective rate predictions than the company had used in the past.
Employees at the first office soon become both experts on and promoters for the product. By the time Southland rolled out Greenscreens at a third office, word had gotten out that this was a tool everyone needed ASAP. Employees couldn’t wait to get their hands on the tool that was helping the two lowest-volume offices noticeably increase their load counts.
The implementation schedule was accelerated. Before they even had access to the tools, brokers from an office in a major metro area began to ask brokers from the Greenscreens-empowered offices to run batch rates for them. There was no need to sell Greenscreens to everyone. Peer promotion did all the work.
The Big Goals
Find New Lanes: Goal Met
Equipped with extensive data from Greenscreens and analytics from Greenscreens Insights, Southland was able to identify opportunities for new lanes and recognize target-rich markets for their sales team. They came up with the idea of running post-dated rates and comparing them against historical quote data to help their team get better and better at pricing.
Increase the Load Count: Goal Met
In that first month, Southland’s load count had increased by 21%. Since then, it has continued to increase in varying increments.
Mitigate Competitive Fallout: Goal Met
Greenscreens’ predictive modeling helped Southland tailor their outreach to customer volume. They also used their historical data from Greenscreens to forecast margins, monitor their success and adjust their strategy where needed, and used historical data to set short- and long-term margin and revenue goals.
Maximizing Assets: Goal Met
After a little investigation, they discovered that predictions from Greenscreens could help them maximize their assets as well as their regular rates. From their TMS, they pulled data on loads booked through brokers. Operations compared the data to post-dated batch rates from Greenscreens, which gave them a starting point for discussion of rates on brokered loads. It soon became clear that keeping pricing on brokered loads within a certain range of Greenscreens’ median rate would help Southland get the absolute most value from their assets. Since those assets were broken down by team, they could also see which teams had been pricing brokered loads most effectively.
Mutual Innovation
"I like to click through Greenscreens.ai as much as I can because I learn something new every time." – Patrick Spence, Director of Strategic Accounts
We learn a lot from our customers here at Greenscreens. Brokerages are always coming up with clever new ways to implement predictive freight pricing in their offices and put data to work. We were especially impressed with the adroitness of the rollout at Southland. Instead of trying to sell Greenscreens to every single employee, Patrick and Southland demonstrated the effectiveness of Greenscreens to their brokers and made peer promotion work for them.
Meanwhile, our developers work to build new features and products to support these emerging uses, and the upward spiral continues!
