Sometimes there’s a surprising dose of creativity within practicality. The leadership at Milestone, a lessor of transportation equipment that fields a combined fleet of approximately 85,000 chassis, trailers, and domestic containers, looks at a trailer and sees a storage solution that goes beyond the typical application. The company turns its army of 57,000 trailers (and counting) into a product holding tank that aims to address its clients’ volume, location, and timeframe requirements.
Mobile Warehousing and Storage
“The space allowance is something we talk through with a customer,” said Sarah Johnson, executive vice president, mobile warehousing and storage, “as there are two factors that determine how space would translate from a standard warehouse to a trailer.”
The first, Johnson explained, is based on how many pallets a customer is looking to store. “There is a space constraint that is typically 26 to 30 pallets maximum in a 53-foot dry van,” she said. The second is based on how heavy the pallets are as there is a weight constraint on how many pallets we can store as overloading a trailer could cause it to fail.
“With a conversation to understand our customers’ storage needs, we can make a recommendation on securing the proper amount of storage space for whatever product is being stored,” she said.
Having the “right equipment for the right application” is a cliché, but only when you take it at face value. Consider the statement from a different angle and you start to see things the Milestone way. When Milestone’s growth exploded and began to move at the speed of light, the company turned to pre-owned Great Dane trailers for its capacity solution.
Pre-Owned Trailers Provide Customers Affordable Rates
“A quality pre-owned trailer purchase program is an extremely cost-effective method of growing our fleet, especially when manufacturers have reached new trailer capacity or have lead times for new trailers that do not meet your customers’ timelines,” said Rob Garrity, Milestone national account manager. “Effectively managing our pre-owned trailers provides our customers with safe, reliable, well-maintained trailers at very affordable rates tailored to meet their unique needs.”
Milestone holds its pre-owned trailers to the same standards that most reserve for brand-new haulers. They are triple inspected at inbound, after repairs and outbound by operations employees certified through its Trailer Inspection Certification Program. Plus, Milestone’s network of vendor partners ensures superior repairs and service nationwide.
After trailers roll into Milestone’s fleet, flexibility is key.
“Pre-owned trailers give us the ability to supplement customer lease and rental needs, purchase for resale, or just acquire for speculation of future need,” Garrity said. “These pre-owned trailers are then applied to the many comprehensive, flexible, innovative, and cost-effective trailer solutions that we provide to customers through our nationwide network of 28 locations.”
Pre-owned trailers are also fitted with telematics devices, which plays a major role in the management of Milestone’s entire fleet by providing benefits such as asset/load recovery, dwell-time reduction, predictive maintenance, and more. Milestone works closely with its telematics partners to stay up to speed with technology providing added value to its customers.
Daily business at Milestone is a balancing act of equipment productivity and ROI—a reality that everyone in the industry is familiar with—but the forward-looking vision is focused on practically filling gaps with creative uses of the right equipment.
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