Freight brokering is a cash-flow intensive business.  "Small" back office numbers can add up to a significant figure that comes off the bottom-line.  Nobody knows this better than Richard Fink, one of three partners at General Transportation in Portland, Oregon.

We recently had a chance to record a conversation with Richard about the difference that technology has made in holding his back office costs down as General has grown from a single office freight brokerage that opened in 1990 to what is currently a six-office operation across the U.S.

Some seventeen years ago, General started with a transportation management system that is now known as TransCore's 3sixty Operations Management solution.  They recently opted for the new Windows-based 3sixty Logistics Suite as well as the 3sixty Imaging Suite, a document management system optimized by TransCore's OEM partner, PaperWise to cut down and expedite the enormous amount of paperwork associated with the transportation industry.

As Richard makes clear, technology is one thing; customer service another.  He relates a couple of incidents in which disk drives crashed and TransCore's customer service helped make the downtime invisible to General's customers -- even over a July 4th weekend.

Listen to the experiences of a 14 year veteran of the industry:

Part 1-- Mr. Fink tells about his experiences with TransCore's broker logistics products. (WMV 7 minutes, 54 seconds)
Part 2--Mr. Fink talks about being a broker in the transportation industry.  (WMV 4 minutes 15 seconds)