3PL news: Greatwide rolls out Managed Transportation Services offering

Non asset-based third party logistics services provider Greatwide Logistics has launched a new service offering.

Entitled Managed Transportation Services (MTS), company officials said this offering provides shippers with superior visibility from pickup through delivery, coupled with centralized technology to monitor and improve supply chain operations. They added that MTS is comprised of various Greatwide core competencies, including: Dedicated, Brokerage, and Warehousing.

This launch follows a March announcement made by Greatwide, when the company rolled out a major re-branding push focused on its MTS-based dedicated fleet management services. As part of this effort, Greatwide took steps to consolidate its sales and business development groups so they were selling everything the company offers, followed by the creation of marketing, sales support, and engineering groups to re-launch the Greatwide brand and Website.

In an interview with LM, Greatwide Chief Customer Officer Vin Gulisano said that MTS had been planned for roughly the last 18 months.

“What drove the need [for MTS] was really Greatwide being positioned in the middle of a lot of very large shippers, and then we started doing more and more with mid-sized companies,” he said. “We started preparing a strategy for large shippers as they started to take control of their transportation spend and looked at the pressures that was placing on the mid-sized shippers. And we saw the pressures they were having and applied it against the landscape of the economy, knowing that at some point soon capacity is going to dry up, rates are going to increase, leading them to wonder where the pressure is going to fall.”

That pressure would be most likely to fall on mid-sized companies, noted Gulisano. This made now the right time, he said, to put together an offering which could help mitigate that pressure.

When asked how MTS can best benefit shippers, Gulisano explained that transportation savings is at the top of the list.

“This comes through our ability to aggregate purchasing power for shippers,” he said. “It is the driver, coupled with the technology we offer through our Transportation Management System platform. This allows shippers to be more efficient than if they were managing transportation spend on their own. The [biggest savings] comes from the ability to offset pure transportation costs through buying power.”

In terms of the competitive advantages MTS offers, Gulisano said several of Greatwide’s competitors focus on the largest competitors—at the expense of mid-sized companies. And he explained that Greatwide is taking a differentiated approach by centralizing its operations with MTS and leveraging its own capacity on a dedicated basis—with backhaul capacity being the capacity that shippers often do not have access to today, due to market conditions unless leveraging an MTS model.

“We are trying to provide this service to shippers that are under-served and are also leveraging a dedicated fleet in a way that no other dedicated provider has before,” said Gulisano. “This is being combined with our brokerage and warehousing services to form an integrated solution, which ideally will give us a bigger mousetrap.”

Greawide officials also pointed to the following areas below as the nuts and bolts of its MTS offering:
1. Measurement — extensive monitoring, tracking and analysis of data to allow the best decisions on mode optimization, consolidation and deployment of carriers, including private fleet, dedicated and unique hybrid combinations.
2. Capability — annual bids and mini-bids to expedite transportation procurement processes and eliminate manual processing, improving auditing and payment capabilities.
3. Transportation Savings — minimization of rates by making the least expensive mode choice based on service requirements and shipment weight/dimensions. Instant comparison of available options enables mode conversion, shipment consolidation, flow-through warehouses and other rate savings.
4. Greatwide Resources — unparalleled carrier capacity, along with proactive continuous improvement through best-in-class engineering and account management resources.