Large drilling rigs moving along highways and back to warehouses move the world’s goods. Amazon boxes, furniture boxes, banana stands, maybe the gadget you’re using to read this story — in fact, every item on hand has likely been moved in several semis. However, this diesel-guzzling industry is also a marvel of inefficiency, rife with problems that has proven shockingly immune to technology’s magic wand. For about 20% of the miles a cargo truck travels on the road, the cargo truck is carrying nothing. Such “empty miles” are a sad joke in the business world: air is the most shipped commodity on the planet.
Just off the A4 motorway in southwestern Poland, on a small plot of land lined with tractor trailers on the outskirts of Boleslawiec, Mariusz Grzys is thinking about how to reduce the number of empty kilometers he drives. His company, Demar-Trans, has grown to a fleet of 28 trucks contracted to transport everything from car seats to dog food to plastics across Europe. Load management is a daily migraine with new orders, price negotiations and shipment tracking typically handled by email and phone. Then there’s waiting to receive payment, which can take three months to process while Grzes has to cover overhead. “We struggle to get paid all the time,” he says one November afternoon inside his four-office headquarters, where two administrators and dispatchers are drowning in printed invoices and schedules.
