England Logistics Purchases McLeod’s Brokerage Software

This story appears in the June 14 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

The logistics arm of truckload carrier C.R. England Inc., Salt Lake City, has purchased brokerage software from McLeod Software Corp., the two companies announced on June 3.

England Logistics said it will use McLeod’s PowerBroker in its truckload sourcing, freight brokerage and inbound container businesses.

An England Logistics executive said the company purchased PowerBroker from McLeod after scrapping a project to develop custom software that paired an England-

developed interface with AS/400-based software from the former Innovative Computing Corp., which is now part of TMW Systems.

The company had planned to “create an interface for both our customer database as well as our carrier database that would use the Innovative system as the primary,” said Jason Beardall, England

Logistics’ vice president of truckload sourcing.

The plan ultimately did not meet England’s expectations, and the company started shopping for replacement software.

“It started last year, and we made the decision at the beginning of this year,” Michelle Potter, England Logistics’ director of strategic development, said.

“Part of our initial negotiations involved a lot of enhancements” to PowerBroker, Potter said.

She declined to specify the tweaks that England had made — or planned to make — to PowerBroker. However, Potter hinted that data analytics were likely to figure into England’s customization plans.

“One of the things that is critical to us is how we take advantage of data intelligence,” Potter told Transport Topics.

C.R. England, the parent of England Logistics, ranks No. 30 on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in the United States and Canada.

An executive with McLeod said that the England Logistics account is a noteworthy win for the Birmingham, Ala., software developer.

England Logistics “is one of our top 10 brokerage custo-mers,” said Rick Halbrooks, McLeod’s vice president of sales and marketing.

McLeod currently has approximately 300 PowerBroker customers, which compares with about 400 customers for the company’s dispatch and operations software, Halbrooks said.

Halbrooks declined to specify what changes England Logistics planned to make to the off-the-shelf version of its PowerBroker software.

“They have some ideas of the way they want things done that we’ll be incorporating into our process,” Halbrooks said.

McLeod already counted C.R. England as a customer before the recent deal with England Logistics. In fact, the carrier helped the software company to develop and test HirePower, an application that is designed to automate parts of the driver hiring process for trucking fleets.