J.B. Hunt, BNSF Launch Intermodal Service Offering

Two well-known asset-based players, Lowell, Ark.-based J.B. Hunt Transport Services, a subsidiary of Lowell, Ark.-based trucking and intermodal services bellwether J.B. Hunt, and Fort Worth, Texas-based Class I freight railroad BNSF Railway announced this week they are collaborating on a new intermodal service offering.

The companies said that the new service, entitled Quantum, accommodates what they call the service-sensitive highway freight needs of customer supply chains. They added that the main objective of the service is providing the consistency, agility, and speed required to move service-sensitive highway freight via rail, with a specific customer focus on service expectations, transit requirements, and operational procedures.

They also explained that the Quantum service is comprised of J.B. Hunt and BNSF operators working out of the same location, at the recently-opened Intermodal Innovation Center at the BNSF Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters, where the “workflow is integrated at every step of the intermodal shipping process—from planning to execution and oversight to exception management.”

Key service elements of Quantum highlighted by J.B. Hunt and BNSF include:

• Up to 95% on-time delivery service approximately a day faster than traditional intermodal service, with planning aligning forecasts for dray, container, and rail capacity with customer needs, and priority drayage and rail movement are incorporated to provide faster, more consistent transits;
• 24/7 oversight of every Quantum load with the Quantum team being able to quickly detect and resolve issues before they impact final delivery; and
• Service and technology integration allowing the Quantum team to identify variability and recommend an alternate solution among standard intermodal, expedited intermodal and over-the-road

In an interview with Logistics Management, Darren Field, president of intermodal, at J.B. Hunt, explained the driver for Quantum stems from J.B. Hunt and BNSF, for decades, having executed pricing exercises with shipper customers and talking to them about the value proposition of intermodal versus highway, going back to 1989, when J.B. Hunt and Santa Fe Railway, BNSF’s moniker at the time, introduced a service also called Quantum, which was comprised of 150 trailers, and was at the early stages of myriad intermodal innovations, including: double-stacking containers; creating company-owned chassis; and adding onsite terminals and express gates.

“And still today through our bid process, proposal process, through all sorts of data analytics that we do with customers, there's somewhere between 7 million to 11 million loads that we think intermodal can and should be the right answer,” he said. “But those customers are hesitant to provide that business to intermodal for a host of reasons.”

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