Continuing Towards Upward Trajectory | Gurpreet Randhawa

He works closely with maintenance department for in-house maintenance facility along with the over the road maintenance department, ensuring the fleet is in its best shape. Gurpreet also makes it a point to keep communication open between the vendors and himself that culminates into introducing any new technology available in the industry to enhance safety on the road and reduce the carbon footprint.

Gurpreet also works closely with operations to serve blue chip clients, such as Tyson, Healthcare and guide sales when required to understand the cost of any particular routes and foster innovation across all departments and units, achieving business resiliency, operations efficiency, departmental savings, and overarching service growth.

The steadfast leader makes the time to mentor entrepreneurs in his community and rising stars and “intrapreneurs” within LSL. Gurpreet has learned first-hand that success in corporate business is only achieved by making mistakes, learning from these, and emerging stronger. He allows this team to learn as they develop, leveraging errors to become stronger. It is pertinent to mention that Gurpreet has built LSL for 22 years and has found success every year as he made the company upwards. He mentors and shares that success never sleeps and therefore requires vigilant hard work with a focus on the horizon.

LSL is Canadian company and a leader in the cold chain transportation industry, specializing in the highly regulated, time-sensitive perishable food sector. Shipping to and from all 48 states in the US and coast to coast in Canada, LSL lives up to its name boasting an industry best electronically verifiable on-time delivery record.

Founded in the year 2000, LSL has grown to a fleet of 800+ power units and 1000 refrigerated trailers along with a fleet of tri-axle trailers for intra-Canada freight. With a majority of equipment less than 3 years old, LSL boast one of the newest fleets in the industry.

Leading the Transportation Industry

LSL has built a reputation and brand as a leading reefer-dedicated transportation company in Canadian and American markets. Their niche is refrigeration and cold chain, and their specialty is transporting frozen and fresh meat, produce, and food products. The company also hauls other temperature-sensitive freight, such as pharmaceuticals and electronics.

LSL’s strategy stems from deep client service origins, integrating customer needs and exceeding client’s expectations: First success was breaking into the beef industry, a closed circle, and an old boys club. Customer service was a clear and prioritized concept from day one, with a natural desire to evolve service to a level surpassing their competitors. After the first 5-6 loads were secured through a broker via LoadLink (Canada’s largest load board), the client – XL meats – was satisfied and enjoyed the service so much that it bypassed the broker and hired LSL directly.

Throughout these early years, LSL understood the entire supply chain to reduce client friction. Specifically, listening carefully to customers earned LSL the valuable insight that providing the maximum shelf life when the customer’s product hits the retail stores through expedited and easy transportation was a strategy and business model to lean into. LSL integrated this strategy into its business operations and quickly caught the attention of the most prominent meat names in the industry. XL Meats, JBS, and Cargill were able to re-activate paused brands due to LSL’s exemplary delivery services during the “building years.” Today, LSL’s 24/7, 365 days/year services include a robust operation and service scope to meet and exceed client demands. The operations scope comprises local, regional, Canada-wide, cross-border, long haul, expedited, and USA coverage. Service scope includes Full Truckload (FTL), Tri-axle trailers for intra-Canada freight, cold chain (temperature-controlled trailers), dry vans, multi-stop, and multi-drop, expedited non-stop team service, dedicated transport, over-the-road, and HAZMAT service.

Key examples of LSL’s current high-value clients include JBS, Olymel, Cargill, Smithfield, Sonfina Wallis, Sneider, CH Robinson, Costco, Kraft, Cole, McCain, Sobeys, Nestle, Sysco, and Danone. To service these big-name brands, LSL invests heavily in operating and growing a sustainable fleet through deep focuses on safety and compliance, environmental innovations, supply chain security, and cutting-edge operations technology. LSL was one of the first company’s industry-wide to adopt electronic logging devices (ELD) fleet-wide, years ahead of upcoming 2023 mandatory compliance. LSL utilizes a variety of AI and smart technology to monitor, measure and improve driver behavior. LSL invests in state-of-the-art, off-the-shelf technologies to manage cargo, update clients in real-time, and implement compliance and risk mitigation. LSL builds a data warehouse through these technology implementations, aggregating KPIs on operations impact to analyze for a constant blend of asset utilization improvement, revenue growth, and environmental footprint reduction.

Technological Advancements

Gurpreet has worked with LSL’s two other owners’ hand-in-hand to roll out a myriad of software to improve maintenance, safety, and operations departments constantly. LSL invests in state-of-the-art hardware and software to sustain productivity, improvements, and efficiencies.

• Regarding operations productivity measurement, LSL has invested in THE DAWG – a TMW software program enabling the establishment of defined parameters and issues management reports whenever the data exceeds or falls short of set parameters. The software sources data from all of the company systems to report on matters such as first load for a new customer, first trip out of a new driver, 30/60/90-day post hire reviews, and employee milestone anniversary dates.
• SSRS – Internal reporting engine to organize data warehouse information. Layered with DOMO, a business intelligence engine built and designed on the Power-BI Microsoft platform.
• Employee Management Reporter – Microsoft GreatPlains/Dynamics – Accounting reporting engine to support key financial decision-making and to feed financial best practices, risk mitigation, default audits, and reporting.
• EDI – For the last 10+ years, LSL has invested in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technology to transfer live TMW freight information (arrival, transit and delivery metrics) to client-end real-time supply chain visibility platforms used by some of LSL’s largest clients, for instance FourKites (example JBS, Cargill), MacroPoint (example Sobeys, Tim Hortons) and Trimble Visibility (example Sysco, Tyson).
• In-Cab Experience – Throughout 2021-22, LSL improved service delivery enhancements through replacing Omnitracs Intelligence Vehicle Gateway (IVG) technology – already a next generation telematics system – with advanced AMG-C powered LAN-enabled tablet environment. LSL now delivers an advanced tech workflow environment to driver employees, providing a clear circle of service summary spanning first to last mile operational-actions, imbedded with clear systematic route points-of-execution (pick-up, delivery, meat inspections, border portals, refuelling).
• In addition, LSL installed the Omnitracs 1 rollout across all tablets, enabling continued accurate live-location updates on all freight data, including automated arrival/departures and geo-fenced driven real-time customer updates. Omnitracs rollout brought dynamic end-to-end route navigation that is intelligent to ever-changing route variables such as construction, road closures, weather patterns, etc. Fundamentally, the system captures and delivers real-time alerts to dispatch and divers when route-deviation occurs.
• Through TMW/Trimble, EDI and IVG technology investments, LSL has been able to sustain continual freight deliver excellence, outputting 99.8% on-time delivery.
• Fuel – One of LSL’s latest innovation approaches has included efficient and cost-effective fuel-purchase planning. LSL deployed a systems integration through Trimble/TMW, ExpertFuel and CoPilot, enabling LSL to measure current fuel levels from truck ECMs and TMW route-planning to predict intelligent geo and volume-driven fuel-purchasing strategy. This process takes into account fuel-range, minimum diesel thresholds, seasonal parameters, range flexibility, pre-emptive optimum fuel pricing routes for subsequent loads and ultimate last-mile success.
• Lytx – Recently, the company re-invested in every company commercial vehicle (including owner/operators) and retrofitted the fleet with advanced AI capable Lytx sf300 model units to produce a higher quality driver behavior recognition program to further track, measure and improve driver safety. Lytx AI tech tracks driver fatigue through pupil recognition, ergonomics through shoulder/neck behavior, and distraction through phone-light recognition, as examples. All video feeds are live and geo-based.
• Safety Scorecard – KPIs measured to track employee performance via LSL’s in-house developed scorecard include (examples) tickets/violations, in-house logbook auditing, CER alerts, Fuel Efficiency, Training, Work Ethic, Driving Behavior, and Crashes.
• Environmental Sustainability – Through the SmartWay partnership/certification, LSL produces benchmark reports tracking year-to-year changes, plus benchmarking performance against peers. Examples of metrics include fuel consumption (L/100km), idling hours (avg hours per truck per year), average payload (tons) and average kilometers per truck (km). Building on the SmartWay foundation, LSL is currently researching investment strategy centered on alternative fuel usage.

Towards the Future

LSL prioritizes corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability as demonstrated by industry best-practice standards, voluntary partnerships and certifications: CTPAT/PIP, TRACE, CSA, FAST, WCB COR, SmartWay and others. LSL holds Elite Carrier Status (2022) with Northbridge Insurance. LSL was named as the Western Regional Winner for the 2022 Northbridge Insurance Transportation Safety Award. LSL is continually named a Top 100 Carrier through Today’s Trucking, since 2018. LSL was named a Top Fleet Employer by Trucking HR Canada. In 2022, only 81 companies nation-wide received this prestigious title and recognition.

LSL’s foundational achievement is operating as a medium-large sized company with 450+ employees operating a 24/7 business to service the most prominent big names in the industry. Throughout the years, LSL has reflected its achievements by earning and sustaining several high-profile industry awards and voluntary private-public partnerships.

For the days to come, Gurpreet and his team are working towards synchronizing Carriers Edge’s online learning platform to Lytx AI-powered safety violation alerts. They are also planning for spring 2023 hydrogen and battery electric vehicle (BEV) hauling and scaling to upgrade the fleet to alternative fuels matching appropriate hauling lanes to strategically correlate to specific client ESG lanes of priority, freight frequency, geo/weather aspects, to name a few.

LSL will also be upgrading its fleet to AMG-C powered LAN-enabled tablets and roll out carrier-partner onboarding system upgrades through a streamlined SaaS overhaul.  They are also building out the data analytics and business intelligence department, digging deeper into data analytics, prioritizing data focus, and connecting business units and knowledge centers through data organization. Identify continued best targets of success while increasing the push-up culture of technology utilization and monitoring. “Towards sustaining and driving a competitive advantage, LSL continues to proactively and aggressively research, locate and integrate a variety of technology upgrades across software/platforms and hardware/assets to secure savings, to reduce an averaged ESG footprint and to drive business operations sustainability,” says Gurpreet.