The tech company is incorporating artificial intelligence into operators’ management systems to tackle the main road freight challenges they face
Ontruck, the leader in technological innovation for road freight, is launching a new line of business on the European logistics market: Ontruck AI Tech. This set of AI-powered software solutions optimises road freight management from start to finish and solves the main cost, efficiency and productivity problems that arise in day-to-day operations in the sector.
Ontruck AI Tech’s artificial intelligence layer connects quickly and easily to operators’ existing management systems – usually TMS – and adapts to each business’s real-world operations. The AI-driven technology, which is unique on the market and trained specifically for road freight, has been tried and tested by Ontruck itself: a company that has been operating in the transport sector in Spain and France since 2016.
‘At Ontruck, we have first-hand experience of the challenges faced by transport operators. We’ve been operating in this sector for over seven years and we harness technology to solve the problems that arise for transport companies every day,’ says Íñigo Juantegui, CEO and co-founder of Ontruck. ‘So, with this new software solutions division, not only are we introducing a new technological innovation to the industry: we are also providing European logistics companies with tools designed to fulfil their real needs.’
Ontruck AI Tech: solutions based on transport operators’ real issues
Ontruck AI Tech was actually born from demand from various logistics and transport operators, which have turned to Ontruck in recent years to find out about its tech solutions to problems that are often shared across the transport sector. Some were losing out on sales opportunities due to a lack of an agile quoting and pricing process, while others were experiencing capacity issues, with shortages one day, empty trucks the next. Other common problems included having to check software-generated routes by hand and finding out about issues when they were already a major problem.
‘We detected this interest shown by operators and realised we had the solution under our noses,’ explains Samuel Fuentes, CTO of Ontruck. ‘Over the last year, our Product, Engineering & Data team has done some wonderful work to roll out the technological solutions we already use in our transport operator activities to the rest of the European market. For that reason, we know they will be a success.’
It is no wonder, then, that an international logistics group and a Spanish transport operator have already incorporated modules of the new software to optimise various processes in their value chain – including last-mile delivery, urgent services and carrier assignment – with excellent operational results.
The different modules designed by the tech company revolve around four main aims: to digitalise the incoming order process and apply dynamic pricing to maximise margins, to implement a smart routing system that takes points of interest (including warehouses’ internal procedures, urban regulations, restrictions on vehicles, etc.) into account automatically and adapts to changes in real time, to anticipate incidents and put together an effective response to improve operational productivity and service quality, and to predict demand for transport capacity to optimise both internal and external fleets.
‘The solutions we are providing for the European logistics sector are fully consolidated, because we as transport operators have developed them and used them on markets with very different characteristics, with a diverse range of types of traffic and freight,’ Íñigo Juantegui adds. In his eyes, ‘This is what sets Ontruck AI Tech apart. Businesses can make an immediate technological leap thanks to tools we have spent years perfecting that tackle the issues expressed to us by colleagues in the sector: problems that we have encountered first hand on the roads.’
