Digital road freight platform Ontruck celebrates a major European milestone today as it adds international distribution to its growing product portfolio. The latest service expansion enables shippers to book international full truck loads for long-haul across core distribution lanes in Western and Central Europe, providing the most efficient and socially responsible end-to-end transport solution on the market.
The international activity will facilitate exports from Spain into Portugal, France, Germany, Benelux and Poland and imports from across Europe into Spain and Portugal. The decision to expand into pan-European transport comes as a natural evolution for Ontruck as the startup has established a broad market foothold handling 20,000+ shipments monthly, across strategic regional hubs in the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands. The latest offering follows the rollout of national services across the UK and Spain and also comes as a response to growing client demand.
“Our growth strategy has always been customer-led and an international service is something that our clients have inquired about since day one”, says Rika Christanto, COO and co-founder of Ontruck. “Understanding the evolving needs of our clients has been the most important factor in helping us to scale our offering, and we now have significant platform synergies by leveraging the marketplace technologies we have developed for regional transport into an inter-European service to deliver the same world-class service into a long haul product”.
Having successfully tested the product in Q1 for clients including Carrefour, GBFoods, Smurfit Kappa and Celsa Group, the results show a strong fit with the growing demand for traceability and flexibility in international transport, which peaked across shipper operations during the coronavirus outbreak. Ontruck’s proprietary research into local freight markets combined with their first-to-market innovations now puts them in pole position to continue catering to the evolving needs of a post-covid supply chain.
“In the wake of the disruption sparked by the outbreak, we’re offering our clients the ability to diversify their supply chains and quickly pivot amid shifting market conditions, so this is the perfect moment to partner with us,” Christanto explains, “For example, our automated workflows and big data platform enable over 80% of shipments to be fulfilled with zero human intervention from loading to unloading, a feature that will take on a new significance in the post-pandemic supply-chain”.
The signature route optimisation, traceability and flexibility of Ontruck’s regional services will also be applied to their international services. To date, the platform’s machine-learning and process automation has helped lower empty kilometres travelled in regional transport from 40% to 20%; this is projected to be reduced from 25% to 15% for long haul transport. These efficiency gains are driven by two key factors: increased visibility and prediction of trucks to optimise network routing and dynamic pricing to re-balance routes where there is an imbalance of loads moving in one direction (e.g., from a production to a consumption centre).
Ontruck’s fast-growing carrier network enables greater flexibility and responsiveness for shippers by using data algorithms to predict demand, advanced routing techniques to maximize the utilization of its carriers, and dynamic pricing to balance the overall marketplace.
