Best Dedicated Solutions (BDS), which is headquartered about 40 miles northwest of Chicago in Vernon Hills, Illinois, has two companies operating under its umbrella. Best Dedicated is an asset-lite brokerage and Best Courier focuses on asset-based last-mile movements and other deliveries for local routes.
As an asset-lite brokerage, BDS has 300 trailers that the company owns or leases. These are used in Best’s drop-trailer program for customers. Best projects revenue of about $100 million for the brokerage in 2021.
The company operates in the 48 contiguous states, as well as in Canada and Mexico. Because Best is based in Chicago the company has a robust network in the Midwest. SONAR helps company representatives monitor the network, and also focus on those markets (such as Chicago and Atlanta) that can have the largest impact on the company.
Best Dedicated Solutions has been using FreightWaves SONAR for about 18 months, and Pricing Manager Brandon Monie is responsible for staying on top of market data at a high level. Among other responsibilities he must ensure that key people at Best are alerted to the “big picture” – what is going on in the company’s key markets (are they tightening or getting looser, and are there any black swan events on the horizon that could significantly disrupt the business).
Monie and others in the Pricing Department work on new RFPs, existing or new business market research, day-to-day pricing activities and long-term planning.
Monie chose the FreightWaves SONAR freight forecasting platform for several reasons. The Best management team knows that the freight market is always changing, and SONAR has the most current data and insights available. Each day, SONAR gives Monie and others at BDS deep insight into the freight world that the company previously could not access. With SONAR the team receives ongoing updates to the current state of the market on a market-by-market, lane-by-lane basis.
