A BRIEF HISTORY OF POLARIS TRANSPORTATION GROUP
One of Canada’s largest privatelyowned cross-border LTL carriers
Since opening in 1994, Polaris Transportation Group has moved millions of shipments between Canada and the USA. Over their decades of service, they have established their status as an award-winning carrier of choice, serving Fortune 500 companies, 3PLs, global freight forwarders and small-to-medium businesses spanning various industries.
IDENTIFYING THE PAIN POINTS
Recognizing the labor-intensive, obsolete and repetitive
Labour-intensive paper document processing
- Drivers responsible for collecting and sorting paper documents (customs invoices, Bills of Lading (BOLs), Proof of Deliveries (PODs), etc.)
- All paperwork compiled and submitted at the end of the day
- Imaging and categorizing each document required several administrative employees committing hours of work
- Caused delays in customer invoicing and customs clearance
Incurred costs from human error
- Paper tracking left room for errors including misplaced documentation, overlooked invoicing and incorrect data collection or input
- Resulted in frequent auditing and thousands of dollars in lost profits
Limited visibility while freight was on the road
- Disconnected communications between drivers on the road and dispatch caused information gaps, hindering fleet management capabilities
- Manual processes delayed customer notification of pickups or deliveries
- Led to customer calls regarding their freight status, occupying employee time and increasing the risk of unsatisfactory shipping experiences
NORTHSTAR DIGITAL SOLUTIONS IS BORN
A vision for future growth
Polaris President & CEO, Dave Cox, recognized their antiquated systems were not sustainable for the company’s future growth. In 2019, NorthStar Digital Solutions (NDS) was opened to develop and integrate new technologies that would streamline and automate their LTL operations, enhancing their overall service capabilities.
RADARO: A PERFECT PARTNER
Tailoring a pre-built application for the LTL market
Radaro is an enterprise technology platform that streamlines and optimizes retail transportation deliveries. Built to complement existing tech stacks, their application was the perfect foundation for the NDS team to customize into a fully viable solution for Polaris Transportation and the LTL market space.
THE DEVELOPMENT + INTEGRATION OF FR8FOCUS
Providing greater agility, visibility and accuracy
Visual asset, freight and mobile tracking in real-time
Gave Polaris’ dispatch and safety teams a holistic view of their fleet on the roads with live capacity yield management
Fleet management functions
- Dispatch could select individual trucks and identify whether drivers were on time or running ahead or behind scheduling for pickups and deliveries
- Allowed proactive management of ad-hoc orders with real-time visibility of fleet and traffic conditions
Unified, instant communications
- Connected the road, the office and the end customer
- Instant messaging allowed drivers and dispatch to communicate and share updates
- Instant notifications to customers of completed pickups and deliveries
Intuitive mobile navigation and functions for drivers
- Simplified application layout made it easy to find scanning, scheduling, messaging and other functionalities
- Drivers could review their daily scheduled pickups and deliveries in single view
- Could manage or adjust their schedule which relayed to dispatchers in real-time
Intuitive data collection
- Essential data was stored, sorted and accessible for Polaris’ head office:
- Canned and customizable reporting
- Historical data
- Shipment statuses
- Driver payment details
- Mileage
- And more
Automated document processing via scanning function
- The scan function allowed drivers to use their mobile phone to capture PODs that were uploaded instantly to Polaris’ back-end TMS systems for next-minute customer invoicing
- Scanned customs invoices were immediately processed for
expedited shipment release and border crossing - Industry-leading capture
Powered by WorkFusion’s end-to-end IDP automation
- Intelligent Document Processing from scan to results
- API for ERP application updates and real-time broker package submissions
- Data extraction via OCR and machine learning
- Total integration and scalability ensuring no gaps in growth opportunities
- Auditing and retracing functionalities available any time for processed orders
A promising collaboration with high reward.
We are excited to partner with Polaris, Northstar Digital and Radaro to bring the FR8Focus solution to market. Especially during these critical times of enduring supply chain challenges, we believe that FR8Focus will help global logistics providers increase the productivity of their workforce and the accuracy and speed of back office processing.
DATA-PROVEN RESULTS
Established ROI
OPERATIONAL BENEFITS
FR8Focus introduced systemic changes that streamlined day-to-day procedures
- Faster document processing through automation:
- PODs – days to minutes
- Invoicing – days to minutes
- Additional manual administrative tasks – hours to seconds
- Proactive driver assistance and improved training using KPI measures
- Enhanced capacity yield management
- IoT device integration for real-time asset maintenance & monitoring
- Displaying temperature, shelf-life, brakes, lights, tires, etc.
- Third-party app integration for weather and road condition updates
- Increased company-wide sustainability and cost savings:
- Minimized fuel consumption from auto-route management using Google API technology
- Reduced paper usage throughout all operations
An evolutionary solution marking a new digital era for LTL carriers
FR8Focus has exponentially improved our driver, staff and customer satisfaction while providing greater opportunity to accelerate our company’s growth. We are seeing recordhigh, company-wide productivity and are now getting the most from our assets and our people. Customs documents are being uploaded, PODs are being sent and customers are getting invoiced all while our drivers are still on the road – it’s a phenomenal improvement and without a doubt, this is the new era of transportation.
THE WAIT IS OVER
Proven solutions for carriers across the LTL marketspace
Working with a large LTL provider allowed us to co-create a solution that has solved many of the current LTL marketplace challenges while being simple to use, yet powerful to scale. Our solution was developed with the carrier, the customer and the driver in mind resulting in truly intuitive systems where workflows anticipate each step.
FR8Focus complements existing tech stacks to allow for efficient integration and avoid the headache of replacing systems essential to running their business. Our ROIs are well-established and the infrastructure is in place – we can integrate into a small fleet or trial portion of a larger fleet in a matter of days!
