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Thom Sawyer Logistics: Bolstering Customer Relationship through Technology and the Best Customer Ser
Dee Blalock has instilled the lessons learned at an early age from his family, and boyhood heroes all of which were entrepreneurs. His most beloved boyhood hero was Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. His grandmother’s loyalty, strong moral conscience and ingenuity were a prominent influencer for the birth of Blalock’s Thom Sawyer Logistics.Based in Metro Atlanta, GA, the company is a third party logistics (3PL) provider, incorporated in 2004, to assist customers to improve processes and cut cost by tailoring individual solutions. The company specializes in transportation management and logistics services searching for proprietary advantages or discontinuities that can be used to reduce spends. TSLS scans unique intellectual property, dominant product-lines and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) growth opportunities. “We look for ways to improve processes, cut inefficiencies and bring down human capital expenditure by automating as much of the process as possible, reducing costs and increasing client’s EBITDA,” states Blalock, CEO, Thom Sawyer Logistics.
The company’s flagship product Acumen Management System manages inbound and outbound traffic across all modes with comprehensive transport management. “We call our Transport Management System (TMS) an Acumen system because it is quick and it puts all the data in one central location—from small packages to truck loads—including all the parameters, resulting in reduced research time, reducing internal costs and boosting efficiency,” giving our clients the knowledge to make the best choices boasts Blalock. Once the shipment is automatically downloaded into the company’s system, the customer service team looks for potential problems and notifies the customers ahead of time giving them options to correct the problem before it becomes an issue for the end user.
Thom Sawyer Logistics is a blend of various best of breed technologies, seamlessly pooled into one. With the help of a closed loop truck load system, the company can easily track the market rate for loads in real-time.
Their systems automatically send emails, track insurance and transit times, including tracking the vehicle drivers using cell phone technologies. This information is used for reporting capabilities and the customers can go online for scheduling reports and making payments. “The company’s Logistics Task Order (LTO) compares all the contracts and blanket rates for a particular customer searching for the most effective way of shipping, be that truckload, LTL, or small package,” asserts Blalock.
The company has three objectives for all customers—providing outstanding customer service, offering best possible savings to each customer, and reducing customer time. For instance, a manufacturer faced a problem of handling long and bulky freight that was difficult to handle and even harder to segregate, since all metal and plastic equipments were shipped in the same crate. Thom Sawyer Logistics intervened and suggested the clientele-package by separating the metal and plastic, making them as small as possible to the exact dimensions of the product that had to be handled. Using the company’s Less than Truck Load (LTL) system, the net result was a reduced sustainable shipping rate of 33 percent.
In the next five years, the company expects to be dominant in the logistics sphere through customer service.“We have been trying to break into some of the faster-growing economies like China and India, to partner with clients to provide services for the Western hemisphere. Our next goal is to attain the NVOCC license to provide our services to clients across the globe,” Blalock concludes.
We look for ways to continuously improve processes, reduce inefficiencies and expenditures by automating as much of the process as possible
The company has three objectives for all customers—providing outstanding customer service, offering best possible savings to each customer, and reducing customer time. For instance, a manufacturer faced a problem of handling long and bulky freight that was difficult to handle and even harder to segregate, since all metal and plastic equipments were shipped in the same crate. Thom Sawyer Logistics intervened and suggested the clientele-package by separating the metal and plastic, making them as small as possible to the exact dimensions of the product that had to be handled. Using the company’s Less than Truck Load (LTL) system, the net result was a reduced sustainable shipping rate of 33 percent.
In the next five years, the company expects to be dominant in the logistics sphere through customer service.“We have been trying to break into some of the faster-growing economies like China and India, to partner with clients to provide services for the Western hemisphere. Our next goal is to attain the NVOCC license to provide our services to clients across the globe,” Blalock concludes.
