Category: Shipper Spotlight

NEXT Raises $97M in Series C Funding

NEXT Raises $97 Million to Drive the Future of Logistics Forward

NEXT unveils Relay, a new drayage service aimed at streamlining our nation’s busiest ports while enabling truckers to earn more

Lynwood, CA–January 23, 2019– NEXT, the technology company that connects shippers and carriers to meet today’s growing transportation demands, announced today that is has secured $97 million in a series C round of financing led by Brookfield Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, GLP, and others, bringing NEXT’s total capital raised to more than $125 million.

“The logistics space is under more pressure than ever before – with more shipments coming into our ports than drivers and warehouses have the capacity to manage,” said Lidia Yan, CEO at NEXT. “We look forward to bringing new innovations to market to address this issue head on and growing our team with the best and brightest technology talent in Southern California.”

NEXT will use the funds to accelerate product innovation and launch Relay, a new service designed to address the systemic congestion at shipping ports like the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which account for more than 30% of all U.S. imports. Relay is designed to bring efficiency and expanded capacity for drayage, the process of moving goods from ports to a shipper’s warehouse. By combining NEXT’s virtual fleet and freight marketplace with owned yards, Relay effectively increases the number of trips that trucks can make to and from port, resulting in faster deliveries for shippers and greater earning potential for drivers.

Relay is currently live at NEXT’s Gardena, CA facility and has already seen early success in pilot. With Relay, drayage drivers increase earnings by up to 20 percent, while local over-the-road (OTR) drivers increase earnings by up to 50 percent. On the supplier side, NEXT customers have seen 167 percent more containers pulled per truck.

In addition to the new Relay service, NEXT will leverage the funds from this round to expand their technology, operations, and sales teams and expects to open more than 150 new positions in 2019.

“As the owners of 37 ports worldwide and the first fully automated terminal operator at the Port of Los Angeles, Brookfield knows first-hand the unique and complex challenges impacting the transportation and logistics sectors,” said Josh Raffaelli, Managing Director at Brookfield Ventures. “We are excited to partner with NEXT and are confident that its differentiated technology, strong customer base, and proven execution will enable the company to advance its position as a true innovator in this critical area. We are eager to work with NEXT’s talented management team and identify new areas of growth.”

“NEXT continues to address the critical issues that face logistics management in the US- from the nationwide driver shortage to congestion and operations at our busiest ports,” said Omar Hamoui, partner at Sequoia. “We’ve been impressed with NEXT’s ability to execute, and the introduction of Relay proves they have the team and expertise to continue innovating in ways that will ease the pain points of carriers and shippers. We’re thrilled to continue our partnership with NEXT as they enter this next phase of growth.”

To learn more about NEXT, visit www.nexttrucking.com.

About NEXT

NEXT is a technology company that connects shippers and carriers to meet today’s growing transportation demands. With smart matching and predictive load technologies, NEXT matches truck drivers with capacity to available loads, streamlining the process and providing drivers with full control over their careers. With the best talent from both the technology and logistics industries, NEXT is developing innovative solutions to solve today’s biggest transportation challenges.

About Brookfield Ventures

Brookfield Ventures is the technology investing arm of Brookfield Asset Management. Founded in 2017, Brookfield Ventures seeks to partner and invest growth equity into market leading technology companies that can leverage the diverse real assets and operating businesses that make up the $330+ billion Brookfield economy.

January 23, 2019
Diversity and Inclusion at NEXT Trucking — Fundamental and Necessary to Growth

At NEXT Trucking, we believe in the powers of diversity and inclusion.
This is due as much to our core values as our commitment to taking part in a future accelerated and grown by technology. It’s why we’ve partnered with the Mayor of LA on the PledgeLA initiative, and it’s why we were recently recognized with a Stevie Award for women in business. NEXT Trucking was also named one of the Top Companies for Women to Work for in Transportation by Women in Trucking.

But this commitment is not just about values and recognition — diversity is good for business.

Here’s why:

A diverse workforce brings a diversified talent set to your company and its business practices.

Skills, expertise, experiences from a different perspective — all these things and more can combine to help your organization teach itself from the inside-out. This invariably translates to more growth and success for your business.

Inclusion reduces fear of being seen as different, which optimizes performance.

When a company creates an environment of inclusiveness, internally and in its public dealings, employees who may not fit the definition of the workforce or demographic majority — feel more comfortable and supported. This, in turn, greatly reduces the likelihood that such factors might slow down their growth and progress as individuals and contributors.

It also keeps the door open for them to more freely share their own knowledge, which may come from a different perspective than others, adding to the likelihood of overall camaraderie and collaboration. Inclusion increases comfort across work groups and keeps up morale.

Different language skills can open new opportunities.

While language and cultural differences can sometimes cause a company some complications, once these are handled or worked through — entire new lines of business and communication can be opened, locally and globally.

Beyond this, when clients (and prospective clients) across the world see themselves represented in your workforce, they’re more likely to feel comfortable and to relate to you. That is definitely an advantage to your sales funnel.

Diversity introduces your business to more of the market.

Arguments could be made that marketing and selling to various niches of consumers (including B2B buyers) has never been more work, or more fully doable with today’s technology. This being said, it nevertheless stands that you first need to intimately know — and be able to clearly communicate with — various niche groups, among your prospects and current customers or partners.

When it comes to groups of consumers who come from different backgrounds, having members of those backgrounds within each wing of your operations — prepares you to more effectively recognize and pursue opportunities among them in your market.

In conclusion, diversity wins.

Don’t just take our word for it. The statistics don’t lie. When employees feel included, innovation increases by 83%. When a team is diverse, decision-making improves by 60%.

And 35% of diverse companies (that’s us) outperform homogenous ones. Want to know more about how NEXT does it? Contact us.

December 18, 2018
How to Optimize Logistics for The Holiday Rush
The holidays are a big boon to business. Shippers, carriers, dispatchers — all of us end up with almost more work than we can handle, to keep up with demand and the higher frequency and volume coming from all sorts of retail (and other) clients.

But in the midst of all this abundance, are some of us leaving money on the table?

Technology is always changing the way we do business. In terms of logistics, it’s never been easier to speed up administration and even delivery.

At the same time, it’s not as simple as “letting the computer do it”. In addition to having the right technological partners — with real experts behind the controls (*cough* NEXT Trucking *cough*) — the savvy shipper/carrier/dispatcher needs to adapt to the changing marketplace.

Here are some tips on how to do that this holiday season. Considering or implementing just a few of them can help you further optimize your business and attract every available dollar in the coming weeks.

Be prepared for inventory management slowdowns

Many of the inventory management issues that can often crop up during the holidays may be outside your control. The more you can help overstressed warehouse and fulfillment staff, or other freight partners, the more you’re be appreciated and looked to in the future as a problem solver. Short sales windows, high demand, and sometimes long vendor lead times can compound this problem. Consider: Given this problem, how can you be part of the solution?

Remember that all business is customer service

Loyalty and long-term relationships arrive when you and your business prove that you care about your part in the shipping process — imagine how true this could be if you prove yourself helpful, dependable, and cool-under-pressure during the holiday crunch?

Fair or not, it can take just one bad experience to severely damage your industry reputation. Everyone gets exhausted during the holidays, and sometimes mistakes are made. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do want to remain polite and respectful, and you want to continue to show that you’re ready to work together with partners.

Finally, the holidays are all about timing. What can you do on your end, to ensure that you can handle increased volume and remain on time? Can anything be planned ahead, that you wouldn’t normally do outside the holiday rush?

Use data to speed up, and to excel

While raw data itself can be useful on the highest level, these days there are also so many specific means by which to analyze your markets, routes, and the results of your work. When was the last time you looked into incorporating a new analytics tool, to help teach you something new about your business? Is there some data-collection solution you can turn to now, to provide information that can help you optimize for next year’s holiday rush? Are you researching the holiday market from year to year, so that you can compare your capabilities to competitors — or use your stats as a selling point to customers?

Keep up with the times, or risk becoming obsolete

There’s a reason we started NEXT Trucking. We saw an opportunity to help people like you get freight to more places, faster, and in a way that helps everyone improve efficiency and save time and money (that can be reinvested elsewhere, incidentally).

With our app, you can:
- Schedule shipments via a network of +15,000 carriers
- Track shipments in real time
- Guarantee capacity
- Speed up cash flow
- (and more).
All this can be done from the smartphone you already carry. We’re here for you all the time — but especially during the mad dash of the holiday season.

Check that you’re ready, and get ahead if you can

Have you done as much prep as you could do ahead of time, to position yourself to absorb the rush? What could be planned that you might not have thought of already? Are you adequately staffed? If you aren’t, do you have a ready pipeline of additional workers to ensure your shipments don’t fall behind? Is your truck or fleet ready for harsher weather and more traffic? How strong are your lines of communication, between all parties responsible for the delivery of your work?

Speaking of communication, get started now (if you haven’t already)

With all of the above and below to consider, it can be easy to forget that we’re all human beings with real physical and emotional needs — including the needs to be appreciated and to be kept motivated. A little bit of pre-communication about the coming rush, to repeat information (so that it sticks) but also to help rally the troops, might seem unnecessary. But a strategy like this can go a long way towards keeping up morale when things get busy and exhaustion starts to set in.

Keep your calendar up-to-date, and know the trends

Do you know the holiday schedules for your partners, for vendors, and any other organizations you might encounter this season? Black Friday and Cyber Monday usually extend for a week or more, these days.

On a similar note, peak holiday shopping times (and thus much of holiday business) are actually somewhat predictable. Patterns often mimic last year’s numbers, and there’s more consistency from week to week than you might imagine. How might you exploit this predictability to get ahead this year?

Automate, automate, update

Automation is the name of the game these days. In addition to what’s offered by NEXT, what else might you do to stay nimble, and pivot quickly, when plans change and planned strategies inevitably run out of road. Are your devices updated, secure, and in working order?

In Conclusion

Finally, remember that it can be a good thing to run out of inventory, or to take on new loads or explore new opportunities, at a time wherein partner organizations and customers need as much help as they can get.

Once again, optimization becomes a process of visualization, planning, and positioning yourself as a problem solver, and as a provider of dependable service.

Happy Trucking Holidays! Good luck, and safe driving.
November 13, 2018
Driver Shortage Still Critical Going Into Peak Season, According to ATA Data

Despite industry-wide efforts to decrease driver turnover with increased driver pay and benefits, the American Trucking Association (ATA) reported that annualized turnover for fleets and carriers with more than $30 million in revenue increased 6% to 94% in the first quarter of 2018.

The Association’s quarterly Trucking Activity Report showed a 20% annual increase in driver turnover for the aforementioned fleets, which is shocking especially given that unemployment in America was last reported in April as being at 3.9%. One of the main pain points brought up in the report was the difficulty finding and retaining quality drivers, a problem that could seriously hamper the industry as a whole.

The outlook was not bleak for all trucking segments, however – smaller truckload carriers experienced a 7% turnover rate drop to 73%. Though the rate is still high, the drop is promising to the abilities of small fleets to retain quality drivers. LTL carriers experienced a 2% increase in turnover rate, but with overall turnover reaching only 10%, LTL rates and retention should remain solid throughout the peak season.

So what can shippers do to mediate the impact of the effect of the driver shortage on their peak season revenues? One is to keep in mind things to expect from this peak season so your team isn’t taken by surprise in what is sure to be a record-setting market. Another is to ensure your carriers have proper trainings and SOPs in place for pre-inspection for ELDs and cargo security. While drivers and carriers hold the power in the industry right now, these steps will definitely help shippers get some power back.

Want to speak with one of our industry experts about this peak season? Contact them at the form below.

June 20, 2018
Feeling the Capacity Squeeze? It’s Time to Get Agile!

By empowering people and sparking their entrepreneurial spirit, companies are using organizational agility to create improved results and inspire creative thought amongst their employees.

For many legacy corporations, the main obstacle to respond quickly to new market trends and disruptive new market entrants are: extensive hierarchic decision-making processes, competing internal initiatives, and silo-based thinking. When the market shifts suddenly, less progressive companies are often left in the dust because there are too many steps and decision-makers involved.

Mike Richardson, author of “Cracking the Agility Code,” told me the industry is entering “a new era of better, faster, cheaper that is requiring enterprises of all shapes and sizes to pivot to agile.” Mike then explained that agility is “the ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances and stay ahead of our competition in meeting customer expectations.”

This is relevant now more than ever to shippers as it applies to the current driver and capacity shortage in the full truckload market. Shippers are now expected to meet increasingly narrow delivery windows or pay costly “compliance fees” or penalties, which eat heavily into profits. With drivers being picky about where they want to take loads from, many shippers are balancing price and capacity while they compete to get their goods to market.

According to the Journal Of Commerce, the US economy has grown at a rate of 2.6 to 3.2 percent growth over the last three quarters, adding yet another layer of complexity to the transportation capacity issue. Shippers of all types need to rethink their Supply Chain Strategy and specifically their distribution schedules, while increasing efficiency and look at making their shipping and receiving processes more efficient.

“It’s an industry-wide challenge, including with supply chains and shippers,” Mike said, “Enterprise agility is the only competitive advantage which has any permanence these days.”

But where does a shipper start with getting that kind of visibility into their supply chain? Without a consolidated log of all their calls and shipment statuses, it becomes difficult to find the blind spots where your supply chain might be weakest.

The first step would be to find a software solution to post and track shipments. Freight tracking software, like the NEXT for Shippers portal, help shippers see exactly where their loads are by the minute through live GPS tracking. Using this technology, shippers can even more efficiently direct truckers at their warehouses, saving time loading and unloading.

Plus, with a full shipment timeline for each load and comprehensive metrics measured in the platform, it’s easy to go back and see any weak spots in the supply chain. From there, shipping companies can then implement organizational agility practices and adjust their workflows to start moving loads even more efficiently by putting people and inventory in the right place at the right time. If you are tracking a load and see that it is coming to your warehouse in 15 minutes, move to make sure that you have a dock available for that truck to park in and workers available to move the freight where it needs to go.

Once you figure out how and when loads are moving in and out of the warehouse, your supply chain will be agile enough to easily recalibrate for whatever shifts the market throws at you.

Mike Richardson is the author of “Cracking the Agility Code.” You can learn more about his work at agilitycode.com.

Have more questions about agile supply chains? Reach out to Gina on LinkedIn or email her at gina@nexttrucking.com.

April 16, 2018
Fresh Perspectives on Standard News // Press Round-Up Week of 3/19-23

The trucking industry is often criticized for sticking to traditional ways of thinking, even by those in the trucking media. We often see the same topics in industry publications rehashed over and over again to the point of cliche. While the issues facing the industry are complex, article perspectives usually take the same POVs industry-wide. This week, however, there were a lot of fresh takes on some of the most talked about topics in 2018.

Special report: Day of reckoning in driver shortage saga

If you’ve been struggling to find new talking points about the driver shortage, Consumer Carrier Journal has got you covered. The publication published the first piece in a 3-month series on the shortage’s potential impact on the growing economy, so you can continue to mine the issue for talking points well into the summer with hard facts and numbers.

Bill Would Create Pathway for Under-21 Truck Drivers

Not all is bleak on the horizon in the trucker shortage, though. Trucking Info reports on a bill that is making its way through the U.S. House of Representatives that aims to alleviate the trucker shortage by letting 18 year olds earn limited commercial driver’s licenses to transport cargo within state lines. Though not a complete solution, the bill looks like a promising start towards fixing the driver shortage while alleviating the trucking industry’s age problem.

Technology and maximizing your most precious resource

The trucking and logistics industries are currently going through a period of difficult change, making it hard to see the potential impact while dealing with growing pains. Luckily, Overdrive has an insightful column about the positive impact these changes from – get this – a trucker. The writer thoughtfully takes on autonomous trucks and ELDs are not only here to stay – they’re just what the industry needs.

Creating The Internet of Everything

As data from the supply chain moves out of the warehouse and into the cloud, the possibilities for innovation become endless. Inbound Logistics takes a look at different companies and the solutions they are providing over the entire supply chain, from the manufacturing belt to dock doors.

Leveraging Traffic Data for Smart Transportation

With all the existing data available, seeing the possibilities for the future of transportation become alarmingly clear. Logistics Viewpoints breaks down the way that cities can leverage traffic data to make their cities easier to navigate, less congested, and economic. While most of the article is relevant to city planners, the smart logistics professional will certainly be able to identify ways they can use data to clean up their supply chain from this piece as well.

March 23, 2018
Logistic Optimization in the Digital Age // Press Round-Up Week of 2/26-3/2

Many shipping companies today use technology, but most are not getting the most potential out of their electronic devices. New innovations have integrated themselves into the supply chain more than ever before, but it still feels like the industry is just scratching the surface as to what’s possible with digital logistics. So how exactly is tech changing the trucking industry? Here are 5 pieces that look at the possibilities of the internet supply chain.

Food & Beverage Ecommerce: How Online Shopping Impacts The Supply Chain
With 16% of adults taking part in the fresh produce ecommerce chain, the online food and beverage supply chain is becoming even more crucial to food retailers’ day to day businesses. This piece at Supply Chain Management Review goes in depth on the best practices for managing a digital produce marketplace and the various considerations to take into account when starting one.

Why Trucking and Logistics Will Lead the Autonomous Vehicle Revolution
While autonomous vehicles have been in development for a much longer time in non-commercial vehicles, this piece at Trucks.com goes in-depth as to why trucking is at the forefront of the innovation. The article goes into all the different ways that trucks are experimenting with innovation, and is great further reading for our autonomous trucks post from last week.

Are Your Trucks Ready for Last-Mile Logistics?
One of the rising trends to come out of the ecommerce is popularity of last-mile shipping, so preparing your fleet to properly execute this type of delivery can be crucial. Trucking Info takes an in-depth look at what kind of trucking technology and logistic precautions fleets need to start going the final mile.

Store Fulfillment for E-Commerce Success
While it is commonly thought that the rise of online stores means the fall of brick and mortar shops, that might not be the case. Logistics Viewpoints examines how physical stores are being repositioned within the new digital supply chain, and the different ways that customers today are feeling about walking into a store in the digital age.

Tech, not consolidation, will drive container shipping change
With seven container carrier companies closing over the past two years, now might be the perfect time for overseas shipping to experience a radical technology change. The Journal of Commerce argues that getting these companies to use one neutral blockchain platform now is easier than ever, and could give the industry the shake-up it needs.

March 2, 2018