Does a thief want what's in your trailer?
TransCore 3sixty Carrier Blog
Cargo theft costs between $15 and $30 billion per year in the U.S., and it is increasing. The most popular targets include electronic goods, especially cell phones, but pharmaceuticals and food products are also attractive to thieves. Cargo theft and associated losses have risen by as much as 50% across many load types in the first half of 2009, according to a report by FreightWatch International that was cited in a recent edition of Commercial Carrier Journal.

Carriers have taken steps to combat cargo theft by hardening supply chains for pharmaceuticals and other high-value cargo, according to FreightWatch. Among TransCore customers, trailer tracking has become a key strategic element in theft prevention and recovery of stolen or missing equipment.

Missing trailers drain a company’s bottom line, according to Kevin Slaughter, VP Operations at Brown Trucking in Lithonia, GA. “You lose revenue from that trailer, plus the costs of getting it back,” Slaughter explained. “If someone else is using it, you have wear and tear on the trailer. If it takes you six to nine months to get the trailer back, you’ve lost all that money,” he said.

If you don’t get the trailer back, the costs are even higher, according to Slaughter. “Even with depreciation, you lose at least $15,000 on a trailer that you can’t recover. Without satellite tracking, all you can do is replace those trailers and hope you don’t lose them next year,” he said.

Since Brown installed a trailer tracking solution from TransCore, “We know when a trailer goes missing, because it’s in the wrong location in our reports,” Slaughter explained. “We call the company that took it, and often have it back before it’s even unloaded, usually within 24 hours,” he said.

Slaughter believes that the mere presence of trailer tracking units may actually deter thieves. “Everyone knows we track our trailers,” he said. “The thieves skip ours and go steal from someone else.”

When the cargo is perishable, any delay is costly. “I remember one time when we had a load of watermelons stolen out of Dallas, along with the truck and the trailer,” recalled Tom Genecco, president of TFG Transport in Canandaigua, NY.

“I didn’t have trailer tracking then, and when we found the truck in Houston four weeks later, the watermelons had rotted,” Genecco continued. “I’ve lost more loads like that than I care to remember,” he said.

“Now here’s the other side of the coin: I had a guy quit in Tennessee. He just called and said, ‘I quit,’ and
hung up the phone,” Genecco said. “I logged into the TransCore system a couple of minutes later, and the satellite found where he’d left the trailer. It was as simple as that,” he explained.

Even when the missing trailer is empty, the loss or theft of such an important asset can be costly. According to Genecco, it can be expensive and time-consuming to locate a trailer without satellite tracking, in addition to opportunity costs incurred due to loss of use.

“I had an owner/operator leave one of my trailers in Baltimore,” Genecco explained. “It cost me $1,200 to hire a guy to go out and find my trailer, and it was a three- or four-week ordeal,” he said. “Now I can find [a missing trailer] in minutes, and I don’t lose the load,” he concluded.

Jonathan Frichtl, tracking manager for Freight Exchange of North America, based in Chicago, discovered that all trailer tracking systems are not alike. In a previous job, Frichtl said, “I had one trailer vanish out of a lot in Chicago. The company used a [non-TransCore] tracking system that sent me a longitude reading taken at 5:30 AM,” he said. Frichtl explained that he did not receive the location information until 3:00 PM. “That trailer was long gone by then,” he said. “We never got it back.”

When something similar happened recently at Freight Exchange, Frichtl’s experience was very different. “I had a trailer disappear in Texas. It was picked up by accident from a lot, and nobody knew what happened to it,” he said. “With Slap & Track, I had a fix on it fast, and I was able to contact the company that took it.” Frichtl explained the situation, and the other company returned his trailer within 24 hours. “It doesn’t take more than 10 minutes to have a truck and trailer just gone,” Frichtl said. “But you can’t lie to a satellite,” he concluded.

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