Big M Transportation/Diesel Express provides freight transportation and logistics services from its headquarters in Blue Mountain, Mississippi. As a family-owned and -operated business with freight transportation offered in the 48 contiguous states, insight into national and local markets is a key focus among owners Michael and Lisa Massengill.
Michael founded the company in 2000 and today, the brand offers a 400 asset fleet , 50+ power-only fleet, more than 1,300 trailers & 8,000+ Carrier Partners and an impressive business case to any company looking for more capacity in today’s market.
Big M Transportation managers saw FreightWaves SONAR in its early stages about two years ago. However, added pressures on the industry led Big M Transportation’s leaders to reconsider their current pricing strategy. And that was what kick-started the purchase of SONAR, its implementation and the generation of results during the greatest peak season in history.
As an asset-based transportation provider, Big M Transportation needed a way to enable continuous improvement, particularly in the spot market. While the brokerage transportation services and power units primarily ran contract freight, the company’s brokerage side was securing freight and capacity daily. That demand made greater insight into pricing an absolute necessity. That SONAR usage has converted into a marked increase in these core brokerage and asset-management functions:
- Increased confidence in conducting RFPs and particularly mini-bids.
- Better understanding of market trends and recognizing what’s happening through the drill-down data within Lane Signal.
- Identifying hot versus cooling lanes via Lane Signal and Lane Scorecard to pull data at once to help with bidding processes.
- Being a voice of reason and insight to Big M Transportation customers through the value and data provided by SONAR.
“We are actively looking through our prior tools and SONAR to figure out what the most accurate pricing will be on all loads. Even while having access to load boards is great, the addition of SONAR makes all team members more proactive in managing rates and applying data whenever possible. In fact, Lane Signal is among the favored tools within SONAR and being able to view the shipper-versus favor market for all O-D pairings.”
Whitney Stokes
Vice President of Logistics at Big M Transportation
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