New Capabilities for LoadMaster and PowerBroker
New Internet Portals Give Customers a Whole New Experience
With Version 20.2, McLeod Software has completely re-engineered their web access portals for LoadMaster and PowerBroker in ways that will help McLeod customers create a better branded internet presence for their company, and more importantly, create a better experience for their customers, carriers, and drivers.
Recruiting and Driver Applications Made Easy
Driver applicants can fill out an application via the carrier’s website with just a few clicks. When the driver completes the online application, a Driver Application record is created directly in LoadMaster, and the hiring process starts.
Customer Portal
The McLeod system’s new Customer Portal provides the carrier’s or broker’s customer with real-time access to all of their load information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This new customer portal provides assigned logins to customers, so they have secure access to their orders, delivered and in-transit shipments, with a variety of display options to enhance their experience and response time. The portals give customers the ability to easily download document images with retrieval options.
Map views are available on orders displaying plotted mobile comm positions or positions from callin records. The visibility of orders reduces the need for calls and emails into the carrier or broker’s dispatch for ETA and “where’s my truck?” type calls.
Driver Portal
With the new Driver Portal for carriers running the McLeod LoadMaster dispatch system, drivers get a secure login for instant access to their settlement and pay information. If a carrier elects to use the LoadMaster Driver Choice module, drivers have immediate access to the available matched loads that fit their choices in a predefined profile. This feature is especially useful for fleets with significant numbers of owner/operators. Carriers can more easily match drivers with the loads they want to haul and let them choose the load that best fits what’s important to them.
Carrier Portal
The PowerBroker Carrier Portal is designed for the broker’s carriers to access the loads that have been offered and current load information, with flexible search options. Carriers have secure access to their available and delivered loads to provide tracking, trip documents, and callin information.
Brokers can get paid faster by providing carriers and owner operators with secure access to input the things needed to complete billing. Visual indicators throughout the screens help carriers and owner operators easily add shipping related documents by uploading the images directly to their loads, where they will automatically be indexed to support billing. The portal provides drag and drop capability for images which simplifies the carrier’s work to complete the process.
Factoring Portal
McLeod’s Factoring Company Portal provides a new, contemporary tool for brokers and carriers who work with factoring companies which allows them to quickly find the status of movements and reduce the calls necessary. Factoring companies have a clear and concise view in a payment pipeline for all the carriers or brokers. Factoring clerks get easy access to view the status of movements that have been paid or pending, in-progress or delivered, and pay information, such as line haul and other pay records, including advances to better understand the overall net pay for each movement. This portal provides the ability to add images for documentation, speeding up the settlement process.
Location Portal
McLeod’s new Location Portal provides a tool for carriers and brokers to give the staff of shippers at a specific location a physical shipping site, warehouse, or terminal, with visibility to loads coming in to and going out of their location.
Multi-Currency Enhancements
The billing process has been updated in both LoadMaster and PowerBroker to account for customers doing business in other currencies. In Version 20.2, all information for customers – invoicing, billing history, sales, and foreign cash collections (including subledger entries) – can be performed directly in LoadMaster and/or PowerBroker without any requirement to interface with a third-party accounting application.
EDI
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been around for decades as a reliable source to exchange data between two systems electronically. The standard format in the industry has been X12, and serves well its purpose. Looking to the future and the changing requirements between business partners, McLeod has added the latest ability within our EDI modules to interact with applications that utilize other format types like XML or JSON. This expands our ability to integrate with a wider range of systems, customers,
and vendor partners. Adding functionality to send and retrieve data to/from external APIs allows the ability to transmit transaction type information faster, and to shorten implementation timelines associated with partner testing. With these new capabilities, McLeod lays the foundation for integration solutions outside of the traditional EDI X12 data transmission while still offering the robust and reliable processes customers appreciate today.
Market Insight 2.0 – MPact
MPact is the next generation view of the valuable data in McLeod’s Market Insight. This private, decision-making domain and marketplace is available only to McLeod Software customers using LoadMaster and/or PowerBroker. It collects data from participating McLeod customers every day to deliver the best pricing, market, and lane insights available in our industry. The new MPact analysis goes beyond showing McLeod customers a series of trends, it highlights key decision indices with actionable insights and trending tools designed to help users make pricing decisions that produce profitable opportunities.
McLeod MPact serves up a series of understandable analysis screens that provide order and pricing trends, distilled from the automated daily Market Insight collaboration between participating McLeod customers. Hosted in a secure cloud, the McLeod Data Science team provides these analytics in real-time while maintaining a high level of security, so McLeod customers can quickly visualize and understand the trends that will influence important freight pricing decisions.
New Capabilities for LoadMaster
Driver Management Role-Based Environment
For several years, McLeod Software has worked to build role-based environments for specific types of users based on their duties, including planning, customer service and carrier management. Users can perform their work faster and more efficiently if everything they need to do their job is in one place.
LoadMaster’s new Driver Management screen has been enhanced to include a configurable environment so the views most important to driver managers will always remain visible, giving driver managers a faster, more efficient workspace within the system.
New and Enhanced Integrations for LoadMaster
McLeod’s Symphony Mobile Communications module offers the broadest integration available with the best communications/telematics vendors in the trucking industry.
- The use of slip-seat operations has grown with carriers. Keeping track of which tractors are being used by which drivers can be time consuming for operations and payroll. Working with mobile communication vendors, McLeod Software has improved vehicle selection activity.
- McLeod’s current integration to Teletrac Navman’s Director platform has been enhanced to include Hours of Service (HOS) integration to provide LoadMaster users visibility to their driver’s current duty status, available hours and logged hours for the current day and cycle.
- McLeod’s current integration with EROAD has been enhanced beyond the current integration that provides existing driver hours of service and vehicle position reporting, to now offer outbound workflow with optional geofence arrival and departure reporting, driver-generated real-time reporting of stop-specific tasks, and outbound text messaging from the back-office LoadMaster users to their drivers.
- McLeod’s LoadMaster integration solution with Transflo has added trailer positions for accurate and timely access to those trailer positions within LoadMaster.
- McLeod’s integration solution with Zonar mobile communications has been enhanced to automatically capture fuel levels from the engine interface and record these within LoadMaster to update fuel optimization solutions.
LoadMaster has an updated integration solution the inGauge online benchmarking platform which allows carriers to automate exporting periods of financial data to participate in the Truckload Carrier’s Association (TCA) Profitability Program (TPP). The data export allows anonymous, easy participation in the program by capturing the needed unique general ledger account activity in a scheduled process to be used for TCA benchmarking reports.
New Capabilities for PowerBroker
Digital Freight Matching with PowerBroker
McLeod PowerBroker now offers an open API based Digital Freight Matching service to retrieve qualified carriers and loads, book carriers on loads and make counteroffers through integrated third-party capacity solutions. This type of integration will add available tractor capacity so that it is visible directly in PowerBroker. Because this new open published API can be used with a variety of service providers, McLeod is making it possible for customers to take advantage of new solutions that come to market faster than ever. The suppliers who want to offer capacity solutions to McLeod customers can build their own interface quickly, and relatively independently, without waiting on a collaborative design and development process with McLeod.
Routing Guides
With Version 20.2, an important enhancement to PowerBroker’s Waterfall Tendering is the addition of Routing Guides. This feature allows a broker to create and store a list of their preferred carriers based on experience. Preferred carriers are the known carriers they prefer to use on specific lanes, in particular regions, or for specific types of freight.
Brokerage Tracking Visibility Improvements
Most brokers have to deal with multiple load tracking services, because those specific vendors are required by specific shippers who use their global shipment visibility control towers. To provide better visibility for load tracking, enhancements have been made to store the tracking requirements for each shipper and automate the process of initiating those tracking services. PowerBroker users can bypass much of the manual work required to initiate tracking with the right provider for each load.
New and Enhanced Integrations for PowerBroker
McLeod has released an updated integration solution for PowerBroker that allows our customers to easily participate in the Transportation Intermediaries Association’s (TIA) 3PL Market Report. This interface comes completely configured for PowerBroker customers to contribute their data to receive a copy of the quarterly report that gives your company a real peer-to-peer comparison.
McLeod PowerBroker now has a brokerage tracking integration with Transflo Velocity+. PowerBroker users can request load tracking from carriers who use Transflo’s driver mobile phone app. The interface will send detailed load information to the app for the carrier to then assign out to their selected driver. GPS and stop arrival and departure event data is returned to PowerBroker and used to create callin records for tracking purposes.
New Capabilities for LoadMaster LTL
New features in LoadMaster LTL Version 20.2 bring asset based LTL customers a broad range of capabilities to streamline day-to-day activities.
Route My Bullpen for Peddle Moves
This new capability gives LTL carriers the tools to route freight faster by creating a filtered bullpen to route freight to peddle moves very simply and quickly. The new function will generate recurring movements as well. This routing process considers locations and appointments, hazmat freight, certification status of drivers assigned to moves, and trailer capacity.
Weight and Inspection
The new LoadMaster LTL Weight and Inspection module was designed with the dock manager in mind, to provide a way to note orders where inspections are needed and record the results. This ensures the information recorded for the order is accurate in terms of weight, class, and other factors that affect the overall rate of the order.
Cross Dock Manager Enhancements
The Freight Staging dock enhancement allows operations workers to designate a staging area from available warehouse spaces, and trap trailers for freight on any outbound movement in lieu of using regional-based freight placement within a warehouse. This adds tremendous flexibility for the dock to optimize freight placement when dock space may be limited and utilization is critical.
Rating Enhancements
LoadMaster LTL’s rating engine has been enhanced to help refrigerated LTL carriers use Average Pallet Weight for customer rating calculations. The systems D83 calculator has been enhanced to make it easier to calculate splits for pick up and delivery partners. For furniture haulers, the rating engine now supports the ability to rate by seat. Seat data is captured as a freight item entry, and can be used by the rating engine and tariff line items to calculate rates by seat.
Original Source: https://www.mcleodsoftware.com/press-releases/with-new-release-mcleod-software-helps-customers-change-their-internet-presence/