With help from Convoy, Encore Glass is on the right road to efficiency

Deep in the heart of California's wine country, Fairfield, Calif.-based Encore Glass, a provider of wine and beer bottles that are distributed across the United States and into Canada, is a company that needs fluid logistics operations to move its product into various North American locales.

But, for more than a while, the company faced myriad challenges, when it came to booking loads for trucks needing to get on the road and meet time-sensitive destination goals.

Phil Russell, transportation supervisor for Encore Glass, explained that the traditional set-up for freight management Encore had deployed for years was mostly homegrown, in terms of how the company went out about booking loads.

“What we had traditionally done in the past was have the team of customer service representatives receiving calls to take orders and generate trucks for their own deliveries,” he said. “It was very fragmented, with sort of a right hand does not know what the left hand is doing-type of approach. The method applied was not effective from capacity usage and cost standpoints. And we would end up sending multiple trucks to the same location, when we could have combined the loads to reduce costs.”

This process, Russell, was the byproduct of longstanding 10-to-15-year relationships Encore has had with its carrier partners going back close to the inception of the company.

“We would give them our freight, and they would just [move] it however they felt it worked best for them,” he said. “ We would communicate over phone or e-mail to say ‘please take this load,’ and a carrier would get back to us over e-mail. But that would create challenges, with e-mail's getting lost and phone conversations being forgotten. It was not a healthy business practice.”

What’s more, the former processes also required Encore to send a fair amount of manual orders and routing sheets to carriers, and then waiting on replies, as well as what Russell called a lot of “baby sitting” on the carrier side.

“If a load or order didn’t get picked up, we would have to reach back out to the carrier and basically fight with them to acknowledge something was missed or and then have to rush a load,” he said.

Realizing changes needed to be made to streamline its freight tendering processes, Russell said Encore began looking into other options. The majority of the options did not peak his interest, in that they were, what he called, largely impersonal and static, to a large degree. But that changed after a 2019 meeting between Encore and Seattle-based digital freight network Convoy and its co-founder and CEO Dan Lewis.

That meeting sold Encore’s Russell on giving Convoy a shot, with Encore coming away impressed on Lewis’s vision to take Encore to the next level, he said. The tool from Convoy that Encore hit the ground running with as an early adopter was Convoy Connect, a free TMS (Transportation Management System) equipped with pre-configured access to Convoy’s carrier network, while enabling shippers to manage their existing carriers and also provide them with instant access to Convoy’s capacity with guaranteed, real-time pricing.

How Encore uses Convoy Connect is a pretty intuitive process, according to Russell.

“It is a mix right now of about 20 carriers that are active in our system, which includes owner-operators, brokers, and asset-based carriers, with all three groups in the mix,” he said. 

In providing an example of how Encore uses Convoy Connect, in comparison to the old days of phone calls and e-mail's, Russell provided a detailed step-by-step walk through of the process.

“When we get a load from our customer service team, we get all the particulars and jump into Convoy Connect and enter the particulars of the load, including dimensions, weight, origin and final destination,” he said. “Once we enter that stuff, we can save the order, and it pulls up all of the carriers that have participated with our bid, and we rank them based off of the rate in Convoy Connect, which gives us the ability to select which carrier we want. For us, we look at overall value instead of best price, so if we know that Convoy is $100 more expensive, but if a carrier knocks that lane out they are going to get that bid above somebody else that is cheaper.”

From that point, once an Encore load gets tendered over to the carrier it wants, Encore then sends an automatic tender request and sets the time and length before it expires and the carrier, on its end, can accept or decline the load.

“Our carriers like it, because it is super-easy and takes additional work off of their plate,” noted Russell. “The way things work out is basically a ‘send it and forget it’ type of deal, because it prompts the carrier to reply.”

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using the Convoy Connect platform, for Encore, has been the significant reduction it has seen in tendering times.

“In the past, we would send an e-mail to a carrier and would typically see replies in one and a half-to-two hours,” said Russell. “Now, we are seeing replies within 10-to-15 minutes or up to a half hour at most. The quicker we can get a booked load off of our plate means we have more time to develop relationships and make better decisions and not worry about if we got something booked or missed a delivery.”

That provides big dividends for Encore, said Russell, as Encore’s business is highly time-sensitive, and if Encore is able to have a delivery window, or buffer, the payoff can be huge, in the event that something is missed or forgotten, which can shut down an entire bottling process that can potentially have huge ramifications.

“On-time delivery is critical for us and making sure we don’t miss a load is just huge,” said Russell. “Convoy Connect has allowed us to do that and makes sure we are better at not missing any cut-offs.”

That sentiment takes on even higher importance, when considering that in 2019, Encore Glass shipped 5,200 orders representing 8.3 million cases; numbers that can successfully scale up through an efficient TMS like Convoy Connect.