Broker Solution Helps A Carrier
Keypoint for Brokers appeals to some carriers, too. Take Peninsula Truck Lines, a well-established LTL carrier serving Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Montana.
Not long ago, the carrier decided to leverage its sales force to solicit truckload business along with LTL. So the company launched Peninsula Transportation & Logistics LLC.
"We've only been open since March," said Chet Kinoshita, operations manager for the new operation.
"The brokering division opens up a lot of avenues all over the United States with full loads, which is business they've never solicited before," he said.
Kinoshita has been using Keypoint for Brokers from the beginning.
"We enter our shipments into it. We use it to settle our accounts with drivers. We invoice our customers out of it. We track shipments with it. We have a mileage program on there so we can calculate the mileage between two points (Keypoint offers mileage from ProMiles).
"We've got load confirmations to send to carriers to confirm loads and pricing. We do our month-end reports, our quarterly reports, our profit-and-loss statements. It does everything from the origin of the shipment to the entry of it, to the dispatch of it, to the picking up of the freight, to the delivering of the freight, to the invoicing of the freight, to the settlement of the carrier," he said.
As a veteran of LTL systems running on an IBM AS/400, Kinoshita did encounter some initial problems.
"The problems have not been with the system itself. It's just been with the knowledge of the system. Anything I've had is just, what do I do now? It's there. I don't know whereabouts, being a brand new user to it," he explained.
"There's not a lot of menus. It's a lot simpler than I thought it was going to be. I was up on my own relatively quickly," he said.
Kinoshita said the Cobalt Qube 3 and the Zip drive take up about a foot square total. The system backs up to the Zip drive daily at midnight. He does a manual backup weekly.
"It's a pretty neat, stand-alone system," Kinoshita said.
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