Transportation Management: People Led, Technology Enabled

Meet the Team Making TM Operations Seamless

Enabled by its proprietary technology, Navitrace, NFI’s experts leverage the most advanced transportation, BI, and analytics platforms to innovate customer networks with full transparency. In this video, Jim Hanselmann and Leanne Entwistle highlight how NFI’s teams are able to build modular microsystems suited for each and every customer need and deliver functional, flexible solutions.

Video Transcript 

How is NFI’s Technology Platform Navitrace Set Up?

Jim Hanselmann (JH): Navitrace is set up in a way that we can leverage all the great technology that 3G, our vendor supplied TMS has, but also bolt on any technologies that we can find in the marketplace that we feel are worthwhile to pilot and build and release to our customers.

Leanne Entwistle (LE): By using 3G, we give you access to their leading edge technology without the licensing fees, we take the information from 3G and make it easily consumable and actionable. We also customize your setup based on your organization’s needs so that it is the best it can be for your shipment needs.

JH: One way that we use advanced technologies and automation is to find exceptions. Anybody can tell you that a load hasn’t delivered after the fact, what we’re trying to do is bring that forward, to know that that it’s not going to deliver maybe four hours before delivery, or even after pickup. We feel right now, we have a great offering in terms of exception-based management. And I think our focus in the future is going to be to improve that even greater. 

Right now, I’m most excited about leveraging technology related to weather. What that could mean for our customers is understanding what the pickup location and delivery location weather looks like at the time that it’s going to happen, what the weather on the route would look like, even how the weather is going to impact the delivery and if it’s going to be on time or not before it actually impacts it.

LE: We integrate with a number of APIs to create multi-layer functionality within Navitrace. We build it so that you can get all of your shipment information in one location. We provide access to carrier tracking information, driver routes in ETA’s, cargo claim and invoice data, and shipping documents. We also have reporting and dashboard data within Navitrace so that you have access to all of your business data at any time.

JH: We’re able to manage so many separate pieces of technology through the fact that we’ve hired and retained a great group of employees that are energetic, motivated, and empathetic with our customers. We’ve spread the responsibilities throughout the group to provide ownership to each of them. We’re very open to looking at new technologies,to bring into Navitrace. We’ve built a platform with that in mind. It’s very nimble, configurable, and easy to bolt on new technologies to do a proof of concept, decide if we want to use that technology, build it out and release it.

LE: We’re actively encouraged to seek out the latest and greatest technology to create new experiences for our customers. By using key UX and UI data metrics, we’re able to determine whether the technology we’re using, is creating a meaningful experience. We then take that, learn from it, and try to do better every time.

JH: What differentiates NFIs ability to innovate is really broken up into two categories. This is diverse thought. We’ve brought in a great group of employees across many different backgrounds. So when you pull that team together, what that does is provide a lot of out of the box thinking, which is exactly what we need. Secondly, we innovate through knowing our customers. We keep our developers very close to operations and our customers, which helps them understand what it is they’re looking for.

LE: ​​NFI is able to innovate because our development process is collaborative and iterative. We work with stakeholders and other team members, every step of the way, to make sure that we’re creating a product that is the best it can be. And not only do we make sure that it’s a product that we think will work for you, but we build one that will actually work for you. And once you create a new product, we continue to optimize it and improve it for our users.

Jim Hanselmann, Director, Solution Development

Leanne Entwistle, Senior Solution Developer