FTR and Internet Truckstop team up for “big data” approach to spot market and regional trucking data

Freight transportation forecasting consultancy FTR and Internet Truckstop, an online load board service for motor carriers and shippers, this week announced a strategic industry partnership at FTR’s Annual Transportation Conference in Indianapolis.

FTR and Internet Truckstop said that this alliance will provide shippers and carriers with myriad benefits, including market analysis and specificity for contract and spot freight segments by region and trailer type, with Internet Truckstop’s millions of load transactions meshed with FTR’s forecasting and analytical capabilities to provide shippers and carriers with what they described as a “unique picture” of the current balance of supply and demand between locations, as well as enable them to plan and base annual forecasts on condition for all types of trucks and regions.

These services will be offered in the form of planning and forecasting products with four main benefits:
-timely regional data for capacity and demand;
-access to combined contract and spot market data;
-simplified planning with advanced analytics on spot market economics; and
-spot market forecasts, which the parties labeled an industry first

“We are tremendously excited about this new partnership between two of the premier companies in their respective fields,” said FTR senior consultant Larry Gross at a media briefing at this week’s conference.  “One of the challenges from an FTR standpoint always has been when we are trying to understand what is going on in the world of trucking, and particularly truckload, it is an incredibly fragmented, disperse, difficult to understand field. And in order to understand that we needed to go back to what the economy was doing and build a model to try and understand what was happening in the truckload market.”

And Internet Truckstop, he said, has opened up an entire window of visibility for FTR, because it is generating big data, which he said is a new experience for FTR, as it is generating huge quantities of data on what is happening in the trucking world in terms of demand and region-to-region demand that will give FTR a window into that world, which is far more accurate and useful than any information source FTR has previously had.

As for what FTR will bring to Internet Truckstop and its customers, Gross said it will bring an ability to analyze and understand and forecast what is happening in the market that Internet Truckstop has not previously had. And he added that this partnership will provide a variety of new products over time, including publications, forecasting services, and an array of new products in the coming months.

Internet Truckstop Vice President of Marketing Peter Vomocil said that his company “sits on a pile of data” and has visibility into the spot market like few other industry players do.

“One of the exciting things for us is that big data by itself is simply big data, but big data with insights results in actionable information,” he explained. “For us, it is always about our desire to bring our greatest value not only to our clients but to the market in general. This partnership is an amazing ability to unlock what would otherwise be latent data that we would not know what to do with. We are excited for the opportunity for our data to create value in the marketplace.”

FTR President Eric Starks explained that in the past FTR customers had told the company that there was a hole in the marketplace, with customers asking for different pieces of information.

With that as the case, he said FTR was struggling to come up with a way to fill that gap and had been on the FTR radar screen for a while.

“As we started talking with Internet Truckstop, it became very obvious very quickly as to how those holes could be filled and it made strategic sense to pursue the collaboration,” he said.