This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Small Fleet and Owner-Operator Summit on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Fueling business success through effective technology strategies.
DETAILS: FreightWaves’ Grace Sharkey sat down with Natarajan “Raj” Subbiah, head of product at Uber Freight, to discuss how leveraging technology can improve decision-making, reduce costs and elevate customers’ experiences. Subbiah also described how his company works with drivers to make sure available tech is making the right choices when it comes to moving freight.
BIO: Prior to joining Uber Freight, Subbiah was with Yelp, where he led a range of product teams for more than five years and then served as VP of marketplaces for the global review platform. Before Yelp, Subbiah spent nearly five years at Microsoft, improving the relevance, recall and user experience of the Bing search product.
KEY QUOTES FROM SUBBIAH:
On areas of investment: “I think about tools in three different buckets. One bucket is tools that can help [carriers] build their book of business. These include things like load boards or digital brokerages. These tools can help with market insights. … The next bucket is about controlling costs and the last bucket is focused on operations.”
On how to manage costs: “When you think about your business, think about it two different ways. One is being able to pay for recurring costs or your fixed costs. … The other piece is how you maximize your dollar value for the number of miles driven and the amount of time spent making decisions, not just for you but also for your employees. … How do you make progress in both of those areas?”
On compliance: “This is an overlooked piece of doing business in the freight space. If you are working directly with shippers, they usually have a scorecard on their end. For brokerages, there is no easy way to manage your scorecard across all of them but usually ways to manage them with individual digital brokers. Ensure you have access to those scorecards because not only does it show how well you are servicing the broker, it will also make you eligible for other kinds of services on those platforms.”
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