With Harry Driedger, President at Tretan Inc
Company
Tretan Inc. is a 3PL that supplies mines and energy businesses as a one-stop shop for transportation, warehousing, machinery rental and staffing solutions.
Headquarters
Orangeville, Canada
Industry
Third Party Logistics
Product Features used
Tretan Inc. is a full-service 3PL and logistics consulting firm that thrives on finding cost effective solutions for our clients around North America. With a focus and expertise on the logistical needs of the mining and energy industries, they have built strong relationships with clients and suppliers alike.
The central pillar of a great third party logistics business or freight brokerage, like any other service business, is providing exceptional customer service. It’s the key differentiator that grows your brand, retains existing clients, and builds long term partnerships for maximum success.
At Tretan Inc, owner and President Harry Driedger knew that customer service excellence was the key to his company’s success. He asked: how can Tretan provide greater value to our customers? How can I use customer service to win larger enterprise contracts?
After consulting with the freight technology experts at FreightPath, Harry and Tretan discovered that they could fulfill their goals by providing their shippers with real time track & trace to provide added value to shippers and a self-serve customer portal to reduce manual data entry.
Harry figured out the key to winning long term enterprise contracts was investing in technology that enabled Tretan to provide exceptional customer service.
This was the key benefit Tretan realized when they implemented FreightPath.
In the mining and energy sector where Tretan specializes, it’s absolutely crucial that every stakeholder involved - at the trucking company, mine site, engineering firm, and on-site staff - know when and where materials and equipment are. With the huge scale of these operations, each hour of time lost from delayed shipments is immense. This is the challenge that Tretan was faced with when they began discussions with a major Canadian mining company. FreightPath was able to assist for a few key reasons:
In this case study we’ll examine exactly how Tretan used FreightPath to win the trust of their shippers and win over $19 million in new business.
The first thing that Tretan was able to accomplish thanks to their new FreightPath TMS was to give real-time track & trace to their shippers through a self-serve customer portal. Like most 3PLs and freight brokerages, Harry and the Tretan team didn't have the time to implement a complex tracking solution, but still needed to know where their loads were and share it with customers.
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To accomplish this before FreightPath, this meant hundreds of hours worth of check calls and emails being sent between shippers and carriers on any given week - resulting in additional workload, higher costs and more data entry errors. When the Tretan team looked for tracking solutions online, most were aimed at carriers instead of 3PLs or freight brokerages, and were either too complex, too expensive or both.
FreightPath changed this by providing a simple and easy-to-use mobile app that allowed Tretan to dispatch shipments to carrier drivers, and gave drivers the ability to send tracking information, proof of delivery, and delay alerts in real time to all the stakeholders of the project. What made this especially powerful was that the app gave drivers the ability to get paid faster, maintain control of when and where they were tracked, and receive dispatch notifications faster.
By having real-time information and alerts on shipments, the stakeholders of the project were able to lower both day-to-day and long term risks of the project, and predict and plan for delays in advance - lowering costs and increasing the bottom line.
The second piece of the puzzle that FreightPath was able to alleviate was by streamlining the workflow of receiving and fulfilling booking requests from project managers. Before FreightPath, booking requests had to be made over the phone or email through a chain of command becoming a literal game of broken telephone. Not only did this increase the chance of costly errors in the shipping process, it was a tedious process that drained shipdesk and dispatch employees alike. Nobody wants to be stuck to hours processing paperwork and filling out form for bureaucracy’s sake.
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FreightPath was able to completely transform this process by introducing a custom customer portal for Tretan. Through this self-serve customer portal, bookings were created instantly from customer requests, and documents like the bill of lading and shipping labels were generated automatically. This cut time spent on paperwork and booking at Tretan dispatch by over 75% - especially since these documents and details could be shared directly with customers through a portal or web link without emails or calls. This allowed Tretan to provide service that was faster, more cost effective, and less error-prone than their competitors.
None of these other benefits could be realized if the platform wasn’t implemented on time and on budget. This is where a flexible cloud-based system like FreightPath excels. Without any need for expensive integrations and new hardware, FreightPath was able to train, implement, and onboard Tretan through a train-the-trainers change management strategy in under a week’s time. This type of white glove onboarding and ongoing support made sure that every aspect of the customer journey was as frictionless as possible for the stakeholders at Tretan.
Here’s a quick recap of what Tretan Inc was able to achieve by implementing FreightPath TRM:
Harry and the Tretan team know that there are still many opportunities with current and future Tretan customers where FreightPath can make a difference. In this vein, Tretan is planning to expand implementation of FreightPath throughout its projects and organization - in some situations with FreightPath’s newest early release features. Tretan Inc has only just scratched the surface of the possibilities that FreightPath has enabled.
“With FreightPath, the ability to track freight, complete paperwork, and share updates within seconds has become invaluable; not just for my team but for my customers and carriers too.”
