By: Stephen Lambe
Truckers log over 64 billion miles a year carrying absolutely nothing as they search for their next delivery. To solve this, Transfix is changing the way companies view their supply chain, eliminating time and energy wasted by more efficiently connecting shippers with truckers. What used to take four hours of emails, faxes, and tedious back-and-forth to schedule a pick-up and drop-off, now takes fifteen minutes using the Transfix app.
Maps embedded in the Transfix analytics dashboard show customers where their shipments are along the route. The platform also relies heavily on accurate ETAs to keep customers up to date on the status of deliveries. Recently, Transfix switched to Mapbox to power its dashboard maps and offer more reliable ETAs after limitations with its previous provider were making it difficult for customers to track their shipments.
By early 2017, over 25,000 truckers were using the platform, as well as many of the largest retailers, CPG brands, and manufacturers. The rise in ETA and maps API requests caused an increase in delayed responses and outages. Jonathan Salama, Transfix CTO, explained:
“Our clients really need reliability. That’s why other web-mapping services were a problem for us. In order to serve our customers properly we need to have the highest SLA possible. That includes our maps and our ability to calculate ETAs.”
You can see below how Transfix has integrated our maps into their customer dashboards to display in-transit shipment locations. In the Notifications panel, they’ve connected our Directions API, which provides accurate ETAs that update with real-time traffic — customers can see exactly when a shipment will be picked-up, delivered, or is 1 hour late.
According to Jonathan, uptime for Tranfix’s maps dashboard has improved and the ETAs for shipments are more reliable. He told us:
“We felt comfortable switching to Mapbox because of the ease of use of the API; it’s well-documented, and the implementation was easy for us. It took us all of about 10 minutes to get up and running. The maps are also a new level of prettiness from what we had before.”
Does your business rely on maps and accurate ETAs? Contact our sales team to learn more about our solutions for on-demand logistics companies.
Transfix: A better way for truckers to find shippers was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.