Road warrior

InfoWorld - As the chief technology officer at Elogex Inc. in Charlotte, N.C., Jeff Carter is trying to redefine the way collaborative applications work across the supply chain. To make that happen, Elogex has created an Internet service that allows companies to manage the logistics associated with transportation. In an interview with InfoWorld's editor in chief, Carter talks about why the application service provider model is finally viable using multitenant architectures.

Q: How do you describe Elogex?

A: Elogex is a provider of collaborative logistics management solutions. Manufacturers, distributors and retailers are frustrated with the traditional transportation management solutions that are limited to outbound freight from a single facility or division. What our system allows [companies] to do is use Internet-based software [so they can] dynamically optimize and execute their inbound and outbound transportation across all their corporate divisions and their trading partners.

Q: Why offer this function as a service?

A: In today's world, you have a lot of shipments that you throw into this big planning engine, the algorithms churn away, and it spits out a plan. The issue that a lot of people are having is that somewhere between only 15% to 20% of the plan actually gets executed on correctly because trucks break down and people miss appointments. The Elogex system allows optimization at the point of execution. We do dynamic optimization in an execution manner. By that I mean every time that someone tenders a shipment out and they execute on a transportation move, we run algorithms in the back to check the optimal paths. So now you can execute on the plan dynamically.

Q: What's the business issue you are trying to solve?

A: The business issue is the cost of freighters. By helping centralize carriers, we're able to squeeze between 8% to 12% out of that cost. The other thing that we are allowing is called a continuous move. Let's say that I'm shipping something from North Carolina to California, and that truck goes out to California. The carrier has to then try to find some freight to bring that truck back to home. One out of every three trucks that you see on the road today is riding empty. We allow some visibility within the system. ... In other words, you could use the capacity within your company first, then your trading partners', then the entire network. When that happens, the carrier will extend anywhere from a 10% to an 18% discount on both legs of that shipment.

Q: How does the service work?

A: On