How Airlite Plastics Saves Hours Daily With Shipwell's Track & Trace AI Worker

Airlite Plastics manages 200 to 300 active loads at any given time and for most of those years, chasing carrier updates ate up most of the team's day. Jeremy Forster, Senior Director of Supply Chain, explains how Shipwell's Track & Trace AI Worker cut that manual carrier contact from four to five hours daily down to roughly one. More than a time savings, Forster sees it as a way to get back to what actually moves freight: the relationships. He makes the case that being a shipper of choice isn't just about rates... it's about the people. Cutting that manual work is what creates the bandwidth to get there.

Video Transcript

We historically have about 200 to 300 loads on the road at any point in time, and our carriers are not so good about going in and updating even when they have delivered those things. So we would spend four to five hours a day just contacting carriers.

Through the AI module, we've been able to cut that down to about an hour a day. That's been one of the favorite features. Shipwell continues to innovate and push the envelope.

One thing that has been lost since COVID in logistics is the relationship base. You have a driver behind the truck. He has to have a driver manager. That driver manager has to have dispatchers to deal with, and then CSRs to deal with. And you can't just do everything electronically when you're dealing with people.

You become a shipper of choice because you're nice to the dispatchers. Remembering a birthday is going to get you a truck pulled from somebody else and routed to you.

It frees us up to create the bandwidth to get back to the personal level of logistics.