New planning tool from Ryder addresses internal/external fleet balance

Transportation and logistics provider’s TranSync product is designed to help companies that use mix of private fleets and carriers to optimize capacity between the two.    Ryder System, Inc. has begun offering a new transportation planning tool for users of its transportation management and dedicated fleet management solutions.
   The product, TranSync, is designed to allow users to analyze the best combination of transportation modes at the lowest total network cost in real time, load-by-load, on a daily basis. Ryder said in a statement the tool is best suited to companies that use a mix of private fleets and common carriers to help them optimize the balance between those two forms of capacity.
   “There is a misconception in the industry that you can identify the lowest total network cost based on optimizing lane rates only,” said John Diez, president of Ryder Dedicated Transportation Solutions. “Ryder TranSync enables our team to consider a number of other factors, such as available capacity and drivers, fixed fleet costs, and backhauls, and automatically calculate the true lowest network cost, as well as the best resource allocation for the customer.”
   Ryder pointed to a recent survey by the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business that found the use of common carriers to supplement private and dedicated resources has increasingly become a strategy for many transportation managers to control internal capacity.
   The study, however, found that a majority of transportation managers are still making fleet capacity decisions manually, and based on models that don’t accurately reflect what is happening in the marketplace.
   “The impact of addressing this gap in decision making is only heightened in a trucking industry strained by increasing costs and customer service requirements, in an environment with capacity constraints and an acute driver shortage,” said John E. Bell, assistant professor of supply chain management at UT’s Haslam College of Business, and co-author of the survey. “The implications are clear; there is ample room for improving the decision-making process on how to allocate shipments using a combination of internal and external fleets.”