Sahuarita, AZ -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/12/2013 -- There are more than 250,000 trucking companies in India, and more than 6 million trucks on the road: 80% of the cargo transport in India is handled by ground transport. Transportation costs make up 13-14% of Indian GDP, as opposed to 6-7% in developing countries. That means a large amount of money is wasted by manufacturers and distributors on transportation, largely due to poor capacity utilization.
Space and time for trucks is perishable! If the space in the truck is not filled before start of delivery, then that space can never be utilized again. If the truck waits for one day, it can never recover that revenue. So both space and time for a truck is perishable, similar to a hotel room booking.
What is preventing the truck owners from increasing the utilization? With the common mechanisms in use, transporters don’t have a good way of knowing if there is load to fill their trucks for the destinations they are headed or if there is load they can pick up on return journeys. Sometimes, the agreed load gets cancelled due to manufacturing delays and sometimes it is difficult to plan return shipments due to having no guarantee on delivery time. This being an unorganized sector makes it more difficult for the transporters to predict their journeys.
To increase capacity utilization needs a spot market where shippers and truckers can meet and exchange cargo for delivery. Such spot markets exist in an un-organized way and haven’t been very effective in increasing either space or time utilization of trucks. Spider OpsNet, a Bangalore based company has introduced an online spot market at http://opersoft.com for shippers and transporters that aims to address these inefficiency issues.
Per Opersoft CEO, Ganapathi Devappa, an online platform is necessary so that shippers and transporters from various industries and locations can connect to increase the overall capacity utilization of trucks. Both parties benefit as it reduces the logistics costs for the shippers and increases the revenue from perishable space for the transporters. Using this online service, shippers can post their shipment information, and transporters can bid for the shipment with a quotation online.
Such platforms have been very successful in western markets with thousands of participants, but the Indian market has been slow to utilize such services. With the current state of the economy, cost cutting is the need of the hour, and such online services can greatly reduce transportation costs. With rentals also decreasing, truckers can utilize this platform to obtain extra shipments to fill their trucks. This works for both FTL and LTL shipments.
About Opersoft.com
Opersoft.com provides a process that works to enable shippers and transporters to align logistics needs with surplus capacity, creating an optimized virtual marketplace that significantly improves the cost savings of shippers while increasing revenue of participating transporters. This concept, implemented as a virtual marketplace platform, enables participants of any industry to attain dynamic market efficiency in Logistics Operations.
OperSoft, LLC
Arizona, USA
Email: contact@opersoft.com
http://opersoft.com