Leaf was featured for our use of AI to analyze transportation contracting practices and provide actionable insights for shippers to coordinate across the industry and implement long-term contracting. This recognition underscores Leaf’s commitment to helping shippers, carriers, and brokers better navigate market uncertainty and gain business reliability, while eliminating waste in the transportation industry. 

Today, 30% of trucks drive empty due to a lack of coordination, presenting an enormous opportunity to improve efficiency and reliability. On top of this the transportation market continues to see increased volatility that makes it difficult to plan ahead with certainty. Leaf was purpose built from day one to address these concerns with Adapt, which uses an AI-based approach to transportation data analytics. 

We’re using Adapt to coordinate multi-shipper moves that eliminate empty miles at scale, and to introduce a portfolio approach to contracting that gives our customers transportation stability. Our long-term Flex contracts allow shippers, carriers, and brokers to see beyond the typical 24-48 hour contracting window. By contracting over a longer time horizon, our customers gain 98% on-time performance while securing up to 20% cost savings through eliminated empty miles.

Our next step in addressing market volatility and empty miles is our Flex Fleets offering. We introduced Flex Fleets earlier this year as the first multi-shipper flexible dedicated fleets. These offer the same high level of service as traditionally owned or leased dedicated fleets, with the agility to adapt to market demand.  

At Leaf, we’re working to build the future of transportation and solve freight’s coordination problem. We are optimistic about the future of our industry, and being named a “Mover & Shaker” is confirmation we’re on the right path together with our customers.

The post Leaf Named a Gartner “Mover & Shaker” for Transforming Logistics appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

After piloting Flex Fleets throughout last year with shippers like BASF, Party City, and others, we’ve reduced empty miles by 76% while saving shippers up to 30% on their line haul costs. By the end of this year, Flex Fleets will serve all major domestic markets.

Flex Fleets for Shippers

Reliable Capacity & Superior Service

Dedicated fleets provide the highest levels of service and efficiency for shippers — these benefits are costly to maintain. Dedicated fleets traditionally require leases, often with terms of five or more years, while private fleets require maintenance, insurance, and payroll management. Shippers using Flex Fleets are achieving 99.9% on-time performance delivering to their customers, drastically reducing OTIF penalties while ensuring product delivery always matches demand.

Cost Efficiency & Reduced CO₂ Emissions

Flex Fleets are built using Leaf Adapt — a data analytics program that coordinates multi-shipper moves across the transportation grid. Flex Fleets execute these circuits at scale, eliminating 76% of empty miles from unloaded trucks driving on the road. And, as a result, Flex Fleets permanently eliminate CO₂ emissions from empty backhauls. This efficiency, from moving freight continuously in circuits, is how Leaf is able to reduce line-haul costs by up to 30% for shippers.

Access to Drop & Hook Trailers

Shippers typically need to own or lease their own trailers to benefit from the flexibility of drop and hook freight. Flex Fleet trailer pools are available to participating shippers so they can benefit from flexible loading and unloading without acquiring assets or increasing operating expenses.

Flex Fleets for Carriers & Brokers

Predictable Schedules

Consistent freight means predictable scheduling so drivers can enjoy their lives on and off the road. Flex Fleets offer coordinated multi-shipper circuits on a predictable schedule. Carriers and brokers share their preferred market and Leaf connects them to their local Flex Fleet.

“Sage Freight’s foremost priority is our people — our brokerage team and the carriers we work with,” said David Norman, COO at Sage Freight. “Access to consistent and desirable freight is exactly what we want to give our driver partners. Through our partnership with Leaf, we’ve been able to offer our carriers high-quality freight, predictable schedules, and coordinated multi-shipper moves that make empty backhauls a thing of the past.”

More Profitable Lanes

Access to multi-shipper volume reduces carriers’ and brokers’ vulnerability to market cycles. Leaf’s Adapt software enables freight contracting months or years in advance, replacing the need for load-by-load tendering. This provides carriers and brokers with a forward view of their revenue so they can focus on growing their businesses, not worry about asset and driver utilization. Flex Fleets allow truck drivers to build a reliable income stream and double their profitability by running more fully-loaded miles. 

Drop and Hook Availability

Power-only freight is typically reserved for the largest asset-based carriers with the resources to service a trailer pool. Starting today, Flex Fleet drivers, of any size, have access to power-only freight and can spend less time idling at the dock and more time on the road.

Find Your Flex Fleet

We’re currently operating Flex Fleets in markets across the United States and will continue to launch Flex Fleets in all major markets by the end of the year. If you’re a shipper, broker, or carrier interested in learning more about Flex Fleets, please contact us at hello@leaflogistics.com.

The post Introducing Flex Fleets appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

Leaf’s CEO, Anshu Prasad, and Head of Product, Chuck Toye, met with participants in the Executive Master’s degree program focused on the intersection of government and industry. The class is composed of O5/O6 level officers from the US Army, Navy, and Air Force; GS-15 level professionals from Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, and Defense; as well as International Fellows from Germany, Poland, and Ghana. These supply chain experts were keen to discuss the current state of affairs in transportation, the short-term patches being applied to today’s strains, and learn about longer-term solutions to the fragile and unreliable transportation grid.

The discussion revealed interesting observations about the differences between transportation in the private and public sectors. While Leaf leaders presented on the challenges facing the private sector in terms of unenforceable RFP contracts and an opaque view of true supply and demand, the NDU students noted how much more smoothly this works in the public sector where they control both the supply and demand. However, the participants admitted that their streamlined and reliable military transportation planning process does break down when the military has to operate in a “public-private” situation. In those scenarios, these same military leaders have to procure for-hire private trucking capacity for their domestic bases, and compete with private sector shippers in an opaque and less-than-reliable market for transportation services.

Further work needs to be done to understand the structural, longer-term changes that can be made to have a lasting and sustainable impact on the transportation industry. Policy makers and industry leaders can work together to chart longer-term, structural changes that will benefit supply chains in a lasting and sustainable way. An independent, neutral coordination solution could have a transformative impact on reducing waste in the industry that comes in the form of scope 3 emissions associated with unnecessary empty miles. 

Leaf is building a future where all companies and government entities can transact transportation services with the ease of plugging into a power grid. By removing the difficulties presented by the current siloed transportation industry, Leaf is already a leading force for change. 

We’re working to make transportation planning more predictable and reliable. Using machine learning, Leaf creates efficient circuits that remove empty miles across the industry and the associated carbon emissions. Logistics service providers can move more freight in fewer miles so that they can maximize their asset utilization, while shippers realize a lower cost structure. 

All of the students in the NDU program have been serving our government honorably for a number of years, and it was a privilege to speak with them and discuss the current state of the transportation industry and help inform their year-end theses for the class. We also enjoyed hearing from some of the participants who had driven trucks during their careers. It was entertaining to listen to a Colonel describe the last time they drove a truck! 

Thank you, NDU!

The post Leaf Speaks at the National Defense University appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

We recently sat down with software provider SupplyPike to discuss the ways that shippers can prepare their businesses to withstand the volatility of the transportation industry. Hear from SupplyPike experts about how retailers can understand their data to make actionable business decisions as they navigate today’s supply chain. Leaf Logistics offers additional insights about what it means to build a resilient transportation plan and how that benefits shippers like you. 

Watch the recorded Being Proactive in Uncertainty conversation here.

The post Being Proactive in Uncertainty: Fortify Your Supply Chain appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

This article first appeared on FoodLogistics.com, authored by Leaf Product Lead Andrea Pope

Whether the motivation to implement sustainability initiatives comes from government regulations, shareholder pressure or changing consumer demands, most corporations today have set goals around sustainability for their businesses.

As corporations set sustainability goals, they pursue a number of strategies to address reducing their footprint. Whether reducing their own emissions or reducing the emissions emitted from the energy products it sells, and companies begin offering more renewable energy sources, prioritizing land stewardship and addressing deforestation, among other initiatives.

These are strong examples for how companies can, and should, pursue sustainability across the various areas of their businesses. However, many of these goals have longer time horizons and require significant capital investment today. In the meantime, business leaders need to consider areas where they can make an immediate impact to start reducing their carbon footprint.

One area where corporate sustainability can find significant traction is in the transportation part of the supply chain.

Where the trucking industry goes green
In many ways the trucking industry provides the backbone for the American economy. Truck drivers help retailers stock their shelves, supply the gas stations and play a crucial role in moving food and beverage items through the chain. However, this critical piece of the U.S. supply chain comes with an environmental impact in the form of carbon emissions. The good news is that truckload transportation is an area where carbon reduction can be addressed in the near term in a capacity that benefits all industry participants.

Electric vehicles are usually the primary item that comes to mind in regard to how the trucking industry is addressing the issue of carbon emissions. Companies are investing in greener transportation. But, updating the technology for electric vehicles requires a significant capital investment. Additionally, there are infrastructure issues such as the lack of widespread charging stations along major trucking routes. This will need to be addressed in order for widespread adoption to occur. While the time horizon for these changes is significant, another area that dramatically drives down the industry’s carbon footprint today is increased network efficiency.

Empty trucks offer an opportunity for sustainability initiatives
Today, 30% of the trucks on American roads are driving empty. Meanwhile, shippers across the country are scrambling to find truck drivers to move their goods. This imbalance causes shippers to scramble for load coverage when there is a surplus of capacity.

This is due to the siloed nature of the industry.

The transportation industry historically operates across a series of silos, with each shipper having a limited number of carriers they work with to move their goods. This means that while there may be pockets of excess capacity within a single network, a shipper in need of a truck elsewhere in the industry cannot see or access that capacity. Moreover, even if a shipper can identify excess capacity from another area of the overall transportation market, the existing tools to secure that truck and fit it into their own transportation plan have not existed. But new technologies have largely mitigated this issue, even if they are not in widespread use.

New supply chain technologies offer a path to sustainability and cost reduction
With the explosion of logistics technology companies and initiatives in recent years, efforts have been made to advance the industry by providing new levels of connectedness and visibility across the industry. New companies have emerged to offer real-time freight tracking and supply chain visibility, while others have specialized in automating the outdated processes of communication by building digital freight brokerages and other digital intermediaries.

To access the full article from FoodLogistics.com, click here.

The post How to Build a Sustainable Transportation Plan appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

The typical transportation process involves the annual RFP, which helps shippers with predictable, known transportation needs. However, when it comes to handling unexpected volatility, the annual RFP often misses the mark. We created Leaf Adapt to help address this gap in transportation planning for shippers, offering a flexible solution to navigate through the challenges presented by changing business needs and market volatility throughout the year.

Adapt technology uses machine learning to continuously analyze shippers’ own network data alongside the Leaf $21 billion transportation network, providing shippers with actionable guidance for how to procure capacity across their portfolio of RFP, spot, and a new layer of Leaf Flex short term contracts. By optimizing their freight portfolio, Leaf shippers see cost savings of 10 percent or more.

“At Leaf we see the challenges of transportation planning as a coordination problem. We built Adapt to address this by creating a powerful tool for network analysis on a scale that just can’t be achieved without data science,” said Andrea Pope, Product at Leaf Logistics. “Adapt gives our shippers new levels of transportation insights, identifying coordinated opportunities that can ultimately lower their cost structure. And the most value for shippers comes from the fact that Adapt runs continuously throughout the year, identifying market shifts and business changes as they are happening. Through fresh insights and actionable next steps our shippers mitigate risk and stay very well positioned in the market.”

Shippers using Adapt get a continuous, forward-looking set of recommendations of how to best coordinate within their own networks and across the Leaf transportation network. Shippers can now identify repeatable, continuous moves and circuits that lead to better network efficiency. With 30 percent of the trucks on the road today driving empty trailers, Leaf is helping to reduce that number by increasing carrier asset utilization. This increased utilization and reduction of empty miles allows shippers to save costs and increase service levels to their customers, while providing carriers the ability to generate more revenue, and reducing the overall carbon emissions generated by the trucking industry.

To learn more about how Leaf Adapt can help your business create a forward-looking view of your transportation needs, get in touch with us at hello@leaflogistics.com.

The post Introducing Leaf Adapt: Giving Shippers a Forward-Looking View to Navigate the Transportation Market appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

How do you prepare for the unpredictable? Traditional annual RFPs can’t help you navigate through market volatility because they remain inflexible to meet your changing needs throughout the year. This is when you may be met with tender rejections that send you scrambling for coverage in the spot market.

Fortunately, the transportation industry has seen an influx of new technologies that offer an alternative to the existing annual RFP for truckload capacity. At Leaf Logistics, we are focused on taking a new approach to freight contracting to help you manage through the layer of uncertainty where your annual RFP falls short.

Predicting Market Disruptions Is Hard. Procuring Transportation Doesn’t Have to Be.

While the annual RFP functions well for the predictable layer of freight you need to move, it does not account for the swings in your capacity needs throughout the year that come from unexpected constraints. For example, the COVID-19 impact dramatically disrupted the food industry’s supply chain overnight, leading to surreal scenes like Idaho potato farmers destroying their crops by the million, even while one in six Americans struggled with food insecurity.

Meanwhile, as alcohol sales increased by a third over the previous year, the closure of bars and restaurants changed where and how alcohol was consumed. The demand for kegs quickly shifted to cans and bottles as people drank at home instead.

For large brewers, the supply chain for kegged beer is distinct from that of canned or bottled beer, so this change in consumption patterns forced beverage manufacturers to quickly revamp their distribution channels. This impacted their supply chains in a way that their RFPs did not account for, leaving many scrambling for coverage in the spot market.

How One Beverage Manufacturer Navigated Supply Chain Volatility With a New, Adaptable Transportation Planning Approach.

For one beverage manufacturer, being tasked with delivering new volumes of beer in different lanes than they had accounted for in their annual RFP was only part of the challenge. The acute market capacity constraints at this time resulted in surging tender rejections and forced them to pay premium prices for coverage in the spot market.

Recognizing that they needed a new adaptable transportation planning option beyond their existing backup guide and the spot market, the manufacturer worked with Leaf Logistics to meet the unexpected new demand. Leaf worked with the manufacturer to secure guaranteed coverage to meet the new demand across new lanes. Leaf Flex committed contracts allowed them to lock in favorable rates for months at a time with 100% tender acceptance. This allowed the beverage manufacturer to meet the surging consumer demand at grocery outlets while avoiding the wild fluctuations of the spot market.

For this manufacturer, Leaf Flex committed contracts offered the peace of mind of dedicated assets without the typical long-term commitment. And that’s just one of the ways that shippers can leverage Leaf’s data-based solutions to insulate against market shifts by implementing an adaptable, data-driven approach. That way when the next unexpected market shift happens, you’ll be prepared to adapt.

Want to learn more about adaptable transportation planning? Download the Leaf white paper.

The post Is There a More Adaptable Transportation Planning Approach Than the Annual RFP? appeared first on Leaf Logistics.

This article first appeared on CFO.com, authored by Leaf CEO Anshu Prasad along with Chris Gaffney and Mark Shaughnessy

Transportation seems to be the topic of conversation more often these days. From shortages on our grocery store shelves for everyday items we previously took for granted, to the news of a large container ship stuck in the Suez Canal, to more recent news of disruptions in fuel supply in the Southeastern United States, it appears that transportation has suddenly become more volatile and less reliable.

For supply chain practitioners, however, transportation volatility has been a reality for some time. For decades, sophisticated shippers such as Walmart or Coca-Cola have maintained hundreds of relationships to manage the flow of products to stores and customers, requiring a patchwork quilt of solutions. For supply chain professionals, uncertain customer demand, production, and supply variability throughput require a mix of asset-based and asset-light providers. This mix of providers handles the unpredictable surges in transportation demand and requires supply chain professionals to focus entirely on execution with little thought given to the bigger picture of imagining an alternative.

Like in other parts of our economy, COVID-19 and the resulting economic shocks have forced supply chain practitioners and company executives to examine the frailty of their underlying transportation management infrastructure. Specifically, CFOs, many of whom have had to deal with significant transportation budget overruns this past year, are challenging their supply chain and transportation leaders to learn from these latest crises to build stronger, more resilient supply chains that will better serve the needs of their companies into the future.

Four key questions help shape conversations CFOs should have with their chief supply chain officers (CSCO).

1. How will our future supply chain better serve the changing needs of our customers?

More than a cost center, transportation is often critical to how a customer experiences a company’s product. Unreliable transportation often clouds the customer’s perception of the product they’re buying, putting future growth and margin in jeopardy.

Furthermore, as we strive to better serve our customers, we must also understand how their needs are changing, and how their expectations for faster and more reliable service are increasing. How well prepared to meet these rising demands are your transportation management teams, and the systems and providers you utilize?

What additional tools and data are you using today, beyond the RFP and backward-looking benchmark datasets, to meet these needs and not risk compressing your margins?

2. How can we better budget for transportation costs in an increasingly uncertain environment?

While we’ve previously endured cycles of heightened demand and corresponding budget overruns, these peaks and troughs seem to occur more frequently now.

How can we meet today’s demands while balancing investments in the tools and data we’ll need to manage our future supply chains?

Leading shippers have taken steps to take 10% out of their budgets for 2022 and onwards. They’ve done this by investing in technology to see their demand, and the broader network of supply, in a different way. New technologies have given shippers the tools to make deep analytical analyses of their network data to uncover and take advantage of better-matched supply.

3. How can we better manage through periods of volatility?

Our supply chains are interconnected with our suppliers and often extend geographically further than they have before. This means disruptions ripple through our supply chain and transportation plans, with shutdowns and restarts consuming weeks of our bandwidth. How can we be more responsive to changing patterns of demand and supply?

Historically, this volatility was addressed through excess inventory and capital. Today’s competitive landscape does not allow this and in many cases, the balance sheet solutions were not in the right time or place to adequately address volatility.

4. How can we hire, train, and retain the talent we’ll need to help manage a more data-driven supply chain?

Talented, innovative, and ambitious professionals will be attracted to transportation if it is perceived to be valuable to the company, and a driver of competitive advantage. They also want to see sustained investment in supply chain technology and digitization, accompanied by investments in their development and training to better use these tools to deliver value to the company.

To access the full article from CFO.com, click here.

The post Four Questions CFOs Should Ask Their Supply Chain Leaders appeared first on Leaf Logistics.