Hitrak is a cloud-based transport management system that simplifies logistics.
Hitrak is a cloud-based transport management system that simplifies logistics.
Just about everything you can buy or see around you was moved by a truck at some point. The freight sector is huge and a vital part of the economy. Yet, says Johnny Davison, it can be inefficient. “One in three trucks run empty at any given time”.
Davison is on a mission to change that. He is founder and CEO of Hitrak, a software-as-a-service tool with the potential to simplify complex freight logistics and in the process, boost efficiency, reduce costs and cut carbon emissions.
Hitrak started life as a proprietary freight management system used since 2020 by the OnSend freight service. Davison is also OnSend’s CEO.
It was built for in-house use: “We originally conceived a business model where we used a bespoke proprietary technology to differentiate our service.”
Davison says after other freight companies saw it in action they inquired about the system and OnSend made the decision to turn the technology into a product with its own brand. “We soon realised the bigger commercial opportunity was the licensing of a logistics platform to the wider freight market in New Zealand and beyond.”
Davison says that today Hitrak is “early-stage commercialisation” with a number of early-stage customers ranging from small carriers to a well-known retailer and a large freight company. His goal is to win market share in New Zealand to fund expansion into Australia.
His route to founding Hitrak was inspired by some lessons he learnt from climbing Mount Everest.
Earlier in his life, Davison set himself the target of climbing the mountain. He started with indoor climbing and moved into mountaineering before having a career as a mountain guide and eventually finding his way on an expedition to Mount Everest, which completed his childhood dream.
Hitrak CEO and founder Johnny Davison.
When he decided to change his career, he worked for a major logistics company which he decided would be a good place to learn about business. The job started with unloading trucks and while he was doing this, he realised the connection between mountaineering and the freight industry: both involved logistics.
As a guide he would deal with food, fuel, ropes, oxygen cylinders and the business of getting the right piece of equipment or food to the right place at the right time: “There is a direct correlation with the freight business”.
He saw there was a gap in the market for better technology to give shippers greater visibility of their business. And from there the technology could extend further to help freight customers get a more consistent and convenient service.
Trucks are often empty on the return leg of a round-trip journey when no load back can be secured. The costs of this inefficiency are generally passed onto the customer”
Technology can help fix that.
Davison believes Hitrak could be the Xero of freight logistics. It is a cloud-based transport management system that simplifies logistics. He says it can work for carriers or retailers who operate their own fleets and can handle a handful of vehicles or hundreds.
Davison says the freight sector has been notoriously slow to adopt digital technology. Big freight companies have proprietary systems because they have the capital to invest. Smaller ones rely on using great people.
“Outside of the large carriers, it remains a largely paper-based sector. There’s nothing in real-time, everything is reactive, everything is retrospective. There is next to no digitisation.
“Where there is, the freight companies still use spreadsheets, and they are dependent on the good work and effort of individual people. This leads to a variability in terms of services.”
To tackle this, Hitrak is a suite of cloud-based applications that handle real-time tracking, efficient dispatching and order consolidation.
There are separate apps for truck drivers and for customers or consumers who are waiting for deliveries. These can both run on mobile phones. Then there are shipper, dispatch and fleet tracking apps. The Xero reference isn’t accidental, the popular New Zealand-developed cloud accounting app was Davison’s jumping off point.
“Xero is successful because it is an easy-to-use platform that anyone can use to do something that is, in reality, quite complicated. It is cloud-based and has a user-friendly interface. It works in real time, so transactions are updated as they happen. It provides a continuously accurate financial picture and it integrates with an ecosystem where there is a vast array of third-party applications and it allows higher levels of cooperation.
“Hitrak is cloud-based with a user-friendly interface. We’ve been deliberate about that. We have put the driver app into the hands of a driver, and they are able to head off delivering a world class service in minutes by following the data flow. All the data they need is there and updated in real time.
“We provide accurate real time data to the customer, so they know when to expect delivery.
Everyone involved gets a good sense of what’s happening in real time.”
Like Xero, Hitrak integrates with third-party applications. If a company uses an e-commerce platform or inventory management, they stay updated. There are features so that processes can be automated, operations optimised, and, in keeping with modern best-practice, security is built-in.
Automation helps reduce human error, something that bedevils paper-based freight management systems. Davison describes the manual process used by one of his early customers where jobs would arrive by email and be manually entered into the system. The jobs would be manually allocated to drivers who would take paper dockets, make the delivery, get a signature, take a photo of the receipt and load into the system. The team would write consignments and invoices manually. With Hitrak, all this happens automatically through a series of integrations. Not only does this streamline operations, but it reduces errors.
This has other benefits: “With paper processes, the burden of deciding the best route and best delivery sequence fell to the driver. You end up with an inefficient route where drivers head in one direction, then loop back and retrace earlier ground. The customer isn’t aware of what is going on, so they aren’t ready for the delivery, they may not even be there. Which means another, later truck must be dispatched. Every kilometre a truck travels burns diesel, which is both expensive and means more carbon.”
Davison says an entire day’s deliveries can be ordered into the most efficient delivery sequence across a vehicle fleet. It also helps them load deliveries onto the truck in the right order at the start of the day. “Minimising trips means that you’re not dispatching trucks unnecessarily, you’re not needlessly burning diesel. It means you can use fewer trucks.”
Equipping carriers with the tools they need is a starting point. Things move to a higher level when Hitrak connects carriers to each other in networks allowing them to share resources and optimise further. The Hitrak software can alert carriers when a nearby firm has spare capacity.
· Hitrak is an advertising sponsor of the Herald’s Dynamic Business report.
