Freight Master™ - The Multi Modal Door to Door Freight Management System

FreightMaster™

Functional System Overview

FreightMaster is the multi modal freight and transportation management system for the transport service provider. FreightMaster provides the following functionality in the one totally integrated system:

  • Sophisticated national Job Pickup Bookings, including linehaul and cross town deliveries
  • Integrated online rating and reconciliation
  • Linehaul manifesting provided in advance to all receiving branches
  • Freight Tracking at the item including building a data bridge between the freight item and linehaul unit as well as providing alerts for misdirects, whilst catering for multiple linehaul legs, transhipments and split consignments.
  • Online profitability by transport leg
  • Online financial margin analysis by leg and branch, at the consignment note level
  • Delivery run optimisation
  • Sub Contractor payments ($30M per annum)
  • Freight item information provided to the Internet
  • Operates in a Oracle and Unix environments

How FreightMaster Works

FreightMaster tracks freight at the freight item level from the sender’s door, through the freight transportation and distribution network at every freight transfer point, to the receiver’s door.

Freight items are barcode (EAN 128) scanned at pickup time at the sender’s site by a pickup carrier. Consignment note information is also recorded by the pickup carrier. The pickup scans and consignment note data are transferred to the FreightMaster central tracking database. This data is passed by mobile phone communications to provide inbound freight item visibility.

The pickup freight items are delivered to the Freight Distribution Centre (FDC), where they are unloaded by FDC staff. FreightMaster provides facilities for scanning the freight items as they are unloaded, and reconciling the picked up freight items to the unloaded freight items. The unload pickup scans are transferred to the FreightMaster central tracking database.

The freight items are loaded to a transport unit (TU) for movement to the destination FDC. FreightMaster provides facilities for creating a TU manifest, and barcode scanning the freight items as they are loaded to the TU, thus building the manifest. The load TU scans are transferred to the FreightMaster central tracking database.

The freight items are unloaded from the transport unit (TU) at the destination branch. FreightMaster provides facilities for unloading the TU, and barcode scanning the freight items as they are unloaded to the TU, reconciling the unloaded freight items to the manifest. The unload TU scans are transferred to the FreightMaster central tracking database.

The freight items are loaded to a delivery carrier vehicle for final delivery to the receiver. FreightMaster provides facilities for creating a delivery manifest, and barcode scanning the freight items as they are loaded to the delivery carrier vehicle, thus building the delivery manifest. The load delivery scans are transferred to the FreightMaster central tracking database.

The freight items are delivered to the receiver. FreightMaster provides facilities for barcode scanning the freight items as they are delivered, recording the date and time of the delivery and the receiver’s identification. The delivery scans are transferred to the FreightMaster central tracking database.

Freight tracking enquiries provide detailed tracking event data by manifest, consignment note and freight item. Containing units and conveying units are visible in transit at all times, including the contents of the containing units down to the freight item level. Enhanced service to the sender is the outcome of FreightMaster.

The central tracking database data provides the platform for an extensive range of enquiries and reports about sender service requests, FDC productivity, linehaul and local equipment utilisation, service performance, and activity-based costing and revenue allocations to support management information. Online margin analysis of consignment note information is available to analyse profitability of pick up, linehaul and delivery services. Users of FreightMaster are able to plan deliveries and delivery utilities in advance.