Over the last year, Q Carriers has been updating its tools and culture – and SONAR has been a key part of the transformation that has occurred. While managing its daily businesses, the company has been adapting culture and process while implementing results-oriented change management. These changes have been backstopped by more technology and data so that the company’s owners, leadership team and employees look at the business differently and so that the leadership team can make more educated decisions.

The Q Carriers leadership team also wants to use the company’s tech stack to create greater market differentiation and to help grow Q Carriers Logistics. The company’s owners, Randy and Ryan Quiring, and its leadership team have set aggressive growth targets for the next three to five years.

“Ultimately, SONAR enables us to provide more value to our customers both directly through conversations about the data and information, as well as indirectly by guiding our daily and strategic decision-making in support of their business objectives.” – Todd Waldron, CEO.

Q Carriers deployed and uses SONAR resulting in the following statements:

• Getting started with SONAR was easy, considering the amount of information that SONAR contains. While it took a little time to get our bearings, the Freightwaves team was very helpful.
• We are able to get much more rapid feedback on how our decisions relate to other carrier behavior in the market. Our logistics team is better equipped to decide when to take more loads and at what rate.
• The chart views have become the most consistent part of our daily routine. I love to see the trend of the data to understand where it was and where it might be going. I like the map views as well; I can see where an index is in relation to other geographic locations, but I prefer to see where it’s at in relation to where it has been.
• We have found the most value in SONAR’s indices. They help to provide both broad and narrow views on what is happening in the market. The indices also provide enormous amounts of metrics in order to help answer the ‘why’ questions.
• By monitoring load tenders, SONAR users at Q Carriers can get advanced analytics on the condition of the freight market, long before spot market data indicates market changes.
• With SONAR Lane Signal, users can access analytics down to the granular level of a lane. Waldron noted that, “We have started to utilize Lane Signal more in our daily operations and decision-making. I believe this will add more and more value to us over the coming months.