Convoy Shutting Down?

Rumor has it that they have a buyer now..

Shuttered Seattle freight brokerage Convoy reportedly finds a buyer

 

I'd be shocked to see this go through.

 

Convoy was the first broker that I used on a regular basis. The rates were very high for power only. I would get anywhere from $3900 to $4100 to go from Vegas up to the Portland area with pretty light loads. And they paid in two days for a 2% fee or so. However, it was apparent to me that the company was going to have problems at one point. They really didn't maintain their equipment. I once picked up a load and upon inspecting, I saw that 6 of the 8 trailer tires were SEVERELY under-inflated. Two of the tires were BELOW 40 psi, two were below 60 psi, and the other two were below 80 psi. The remaining two "good" tires were below 90 psi. This was a common occurrence every time I took a load for them, though not as extreme as the example I just mentioned. A couple of times I had to call their road service to replace a tire or two, BEFORE starting the trip. So it got me to thinking...if the TIRES were this neglected, in what conditions could the BRAKES be in? Sometimes the tandems wouldn't slide, another time there was no trailer registration. Seriously, you can't run a trucking company without having someone to do the hands-on work.

I stopped using them when they started being unreasonable on the return times back to Vegas. They wanted the trailer back in TWO days, which is okay if one had a backhaul lined up and didn't have a 3 am delivery in Portland. They didn't factor in that a driver who delivered in the wee hours of the night had to do his 10-hour break and then find a backhaul to drive the 1000 miles back to Vegas. But they were very good with the accessorials and payments.

 

Maybe buy some apple air tags or whatever they are called. Sounds like they work better than this computer system.. lol. I read things like this and lol about all the self driving trucks. They arent able to keep up with a trailer but yet a truck is going to drive itself. Lolol. Sorry for the hi-jack. Carry on.

 

Our lone IT guy wrote a program that does this. TMW said it wasn't possible, but he pulled it off. He named the programs "trailer matchup" and "tractor matchup," and it queries the databases of both the Orbcomm platform and Qualcomm platform and match GPS date/time stamps, listing all the associated location matches. All you need is a starting point, like tractor number xxx on x/xx/xxxx or trailer xxxx on x/xx/xxxx (hence tractor vs trailer matchup). Was it perfect? No way. It could definitely determine a moving trailer without one of our tractors, though.

Example:

Looking for trailer 1234567. Punch in the last date it was with a known tractor and see if one of your other tractors populates after the fact. That's who has it now. If nothing populates, then you have the trailer's location and know it was being utilized illegally.

 

“The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous because the deal had yet to close, said the sale will involve a number of former Convoy employees, but didn’t specify the number involved in the new operation.”

The thing I like about this is the former employees will choose who stays or goes after the purchase.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, used to mandate that 10% of his employees be fired each year - the lowest performers. Some people just don’t give a ****. I like the idea of ranking coworkers from a driver’s perspective. We see things management wouldn’t notice.

 

That's the easy part. We can easily dig back and see every authorized movement, along with customers and dock times. Once we know a trailer is missing, we do a pretty good job a finding them again (all things considered)

The hard part is knowing you need to find that trailer in the first place.

Let's ignore 3rd party carriers for the moment. And non-functional gps.

Imagine a customer that has a trailer pool of 10. Driver brings in a loaded trailer and then takes his pick of the empties. Through natural forces, actual number of trailers on sight varies from 8 - 14. How long can a trailer sit idle at the customer before we start asking questions and manually tracking the trailer?

Maybe it's a TBO trailer and drivers just keep choosing a different one instead of dealing with the maintenance issue. Maybe it's parked in, or just at the end of the row. Maybe the customer is using it for storage, but we never have a problem getting mts, so there's no red flag.

What we want is the trailer to talk directly with the tractor, so when the driver types in the trailer number that doesn't match, an error populates and doesn't let the driver move forward with the computer work. Then once the trailer passes the geofence of the customer it tells us "hey, I've left and I'm hooked to truck 42107" or "STRANGER DANGER! I'm hooked to an unkown truck - I NEED AN ADULT". At the least "hey, I've left the geofenced area I'm supposed to be at".

That's the ultimate goal, but we can't get the trailer tracking software to respect geofences, or take information from the truck and send it up to the Puzzle Palace on its own, or get the trailer to talk with most of the dispatch software. Each system works pretty well on its own, it's getting everything talking to everything else that's the problem.

Then add in 3rd party carriers, maintaining the units, data caps, data security, and it turns into a right muddle.

All I'm saying is everytime I hear someone say "you'd think a company this size could keep track of its stuff", I think "you have no idea of all the moving parts, let alone how they work".

 

I mean, sure. Unless the lot of them have a great big pile of cash on hand, I can't see anyone financing it for them. The ongoing costs are going to murder their bottom line before they even start, and by the time they get the sale through and get back to hitting the ground running, they're going to have jettisoned a lot of the business they had left. Not to mention the fleet trailer issues.