Turvo launched in 2014 with a vision to bring logistics into the modern era. Now, the world’s first collaborative logistics platform has added a vital new capability to its end-to-end offering: Turvo Pay.
With more than $90 million raised to date, offices in the Bay Area, Boston and Hyderabad, and clients ranging from single-operator truck drivers to some of the world’s largest shippers, Turvo has achieved considerable progress in infusing machine learning and rich analytics into an industry reliant on outmoded manual processes.
The simplest way to explain what Turvo does is to say it connects “all the organizations and people who move things around the world,” chief marketing officer Matt Jubelirer told Sourcing Journal.
Truck drivers, according to Turvo, shouldn’t get short shrift with all of the innovation taking holding in the industry. “To a lot of these companies, late payments are as disruptive as late shipments,” Jubelirer explained, describing payment reconciliation as particularly fraught with manual errors. Turvo’s added to its platform a way to process ACH payments and paper checks, the latter of which accounts for about half of all driver compensation, Jubelirer added.
“Instead of bouncing back and forth between Excel spreadsheets and your bank and all those things, you just go in and say ‘I want to pay’ and it does all the math for you,” he said. Accounting personnel confirm the transaction and then all the emails, receipts and reconciliation to the user’s accounting system—such as QuickBooks, NetSuite or Xero—happen automatically.
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“This will reduce what typically takes up to a full day of work down to minutes,” Jubelirer added.
Operating with kind of increased efficiency can become a differentiator for some carriers.
“Getting our drivers and carriers paid faster with better visibility into the process is essential to building a premium services business like ours,” Brian Kempisty, founder of Port X Logistics, said in a statement. “With Turvo Pay, we can continue building preferred status with our carrier partners while creating internal efficiency for our team. It’s a welcome addition to the platform that will have immediate benefit and impact for our business.”
Other features on Turvo increase efficiency, visibility and accountability as well. Retailers, for example, like to know when a truckload of goods will be arriving at their facility or when a vehicle is arriving for a pickup so they can pre-stage their docks accordingly. Trucks arriving early or late can throw those plans into chaos and drive “billions of dollars” in detention and accessorial fees, or what retailers pay behind the basic cost of moving goods from point A to point B. Much of the time retailers and vendors end up in “he said, she said” arguments over said early or lateness with no data to prove either case.
Geofencing gives retailers visibility into when an inbound truck actually crosses into the virtual boundary they’ve established around their facility, offering invaluable insight and concrete proof of arrival.
“If you can give them a source of truth and accountability, then they can make informed decisions about it,” Brian Cristol, Turvo’s head of enterprise partnerships, said. “So that’s what that geofencing does—not just visibility, but it helps remove that friction.”
And while other logistics vendors might offer a point solution like tracking or geofencing, Turvo stands out by tying together every relevant data point from warehousing and transportation scenarios all the way through payments.
The collaborative nature of the Turvo platform means logistics firms can reap the benefits of enhanced cooperation with partners without have to invest in completely transportation management system (TMS).
“We’re not trying to like rip and replace the system,” Cristol explained. “There’s a reason why big companies are still on these old tech stacks.” If you’re a company moving 6,00 truckloads every day “you can’t afford for your TMS to go down,” he added.
“We’re going to sit on top, we’re going to embrace your existing technology stack, and bring it all together new single pane of glass, make it easier to manage your business, and we’re going to help you extend into the digital world,” Cristol said.