Continuing to make “significant investments” investments in its enterprise application software products, McLeod Software has just released Version 12.1 of its LoadMaster, PowerBroker, and LoadMaster LTL products to “deliver significant new functionality and business process automation for carriers and logistics companies.”
Pricing & bids
McLeod’s new Pricing and Bid Management Module is the company’s first step toward helping customers drive greater efficiency and productivity in dealing with the stream of shipper bids that arrive on their doorstep, often on a weekly basis.
“This module gives customers a powerful Workbench tool that helps reduce the burden of work required by RFPs, while also ensuring that their bid numbers are on the money by using their systems’ built-in lane rate index tools,” said McLeod.
The Workbench includes a powerful and configurable data import facility that allows McLeod customers to quickly and easily import RFP’s from a variety of formats into their LoadMaster or PowerBroker systems and track lane awards and rates within the system.
Dedicated billing
McLeod’s brand-new Dedicated Billing Operations Module greatly simplifies the process of creating customized invoices for dedicated fleet customers, where the variety and differences from customer to customer is nearly infinite.
The new optional module is highly configurable, so that it can accommodate the requirements most commonly found in dedicated customer contracts. The new module also supports configurable gain sharing and revenue split calculations that may be specific to a dedicated customer’s fleet for outside backhaul opportunities.
LTL brokerage
The new PowerBroker LTL module brings a complete set of LTL brokerage capabilities into the system. PowerBroker LTL includes the ability to give customers LTL rating, quotes, and ordering through the system our customers already know, and makes those capabilities available through their customer internet portal.
Other features
In addition to the three completely new applications for LoadMaster and PowerBroker, there are many other features being added with Version 12.1
The mapping module for LoadMaster Enterprise and PowerBroker now supports Google Maps as the default option. Other mapping products, such as ALK Maps or PC*Miler windows mapping, are also available options. Google and ALK traffic and weather overlays are also supported.
A new capability has been added to the McLeod CRM module called Objection Management. This new function lets customers create sales scripts to help their sales people and CSR’s effectively deal with the most common customer objections encountered during telemarketing calls. New reports have also been added for sales management that characterize salesperson activity, prospect activity, conversion rates and closing trends for new business.
Both the office payroll and driver settlement functions have been enhanced to allow for the use of third-party tax calculation engines. McLeod noted that customers “now have better choices for automating all of their payroll tax calculations on a location-by-location or state-by-state basis without having to configure or maintain that complex information in your system.”
The rate index function has been enhanced with a new rate index calculator for LoadMaster and PowerBroker systems. “This simple calculator lets the user perform rate lookups, without having to enter a quote or order, just by selecting the origin and destination, or entering city/state/zip information, along with trailer type information,” said McLeod.
The LoadMaster Enterprise fuel module now supports QuikQ as a fuel vendor for batch and support for FleetOne has been added to the interactive fuel module. Batch fuel also supports multiple currencies for a group of select fuel vendors through the LoadMaster Multicurrency Module.
The LoadMaster Enterprise Symphony Mobile Communications system now supports the new mobile XRS platform for position, outbound dispatch, driver records and driver logs. Symphony also offers a new integration solution for Zonar with messages, forms, and JBus data reporting.
McLeod added that LoadMaster and PowerBroker users can take advantage of the web services option for using ALK PC*Miler, giving them the choice of access via a local hosted instance or the web services.
