A case study featuring Zach Cellar, operations manager with Ploger Transportation, and Ben Marks, senior director of solutions sales engineering with Optimal Dynamics.
Ploger Transportation is an asset-based trucking company based in Norwalk, Ohio. It operates dry vans for food-grade freight throughout the lower 48 states, although it specializes in serving the East Coast.
For all carriers, the trucking market in the last four years “has been tough,” Cellar says, both in terms of rates and availability of freight. Ploger seeks to ensure that its company drivers are productive, serving the needs of customers while being satisfied with their own experience. But manually dispatching and planning loads on a daily basis “was a grind.” It became increasingly tough to meet planning, customer and delivery requirements while struggling with low margins and the complexities of routing.
Cellar met with Marks at a user show for McLeod Software, its transportation management system (TMS) provider, with which Optimal Dynamics was already integrated. “Their product and sales demo intrigued us,” Cellar recalls. “It helped us to go with this tech.”
Marks says Optimal Dynamics prioritizes automation, then optimization, all with an eye toward streamlining driver and route management. “We saw a good fit” with Ploger, he says. “They’re open to change, very technology-forward, and they’ve been a great partner.”
The biggest challenge in implementing the tool from Optimal Dynamics was change management, Cellar says. While Ploger was able to keep the same personnel and team members, the system required the creation of new roles. Providing a single view of Ploger’s entire network, it took over the task of basic routing and dispatching. The carrier’s normal outbound planner assumed the role of exception management, handling “challenges we can’t control.”
The difference between Ploger’s old manual process and the automation provided by Optimal Dynamics “was night and day,” Cellar says. As for the future, Marks says, “I fully anticipate we’ll continue to help them optimize, and that they’ll continue to help us polish and develop additional features into our tool as we go forward.”
