Challenger Motor Freight Adds Top Awards to its Arsenal

Challenger Motor Freight Adds Top Awards to its Arsenal
March 13, 2008

Challenger Motor Freight has been winning plenty of top awards as of late. The company has been awarded Platinum status in Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies competition, an achievement which means that Challenger Motor Freight is regarded as one of Canada’s best companies for the seventh consecutive year. The award is based on an accurate and independent analysis of management skills and practices.

Challenger has also won the prestigious Johnnie Walker Blue Award for the second year in a row. The award is presented to the overall Carrier of the Year, based on four performance criteria: timely pickup, timely delivery, load tender acceptance percentage, and EDI compliance. Adding a third award to its arsenal, Challenger has just recently won General Motors award for Best FAST Carrier Performance in 2007 with more than 98% fast shipments out of last year’s 18,288.

Dan Einwechter, chairman and CEO of Challenger Motor Freight, refuses to let the company’s business taper off now after winning those awards. Instead, he is expanding his Montreal terminal to ease the increasingly overwhelming east-west traffic and is planning a remarkable development in intermodal transportation.

Launched back in 1975 as a one-truck operation, Challenger has grown now into a company which is ranked fifth on the Today’s Trucking Top 100 list, for the second consecutive year, with 1500 tractors and 3500 trailers.

With an efficient logistics division, warehousing services, and 650,000 square feet of warehouse space, Challenger has excelled in air and sea freight-forwarding as well as third-party freight management. Challenger has been relying on the truckload, LTL, and special trucking operations as its stock in trade for so many years. Additionally, the company sells used trucks in good condition to customers all over the world.

The company is still specializing in the north-south traffic. Choosing to grow the business somewhere else, Einwechter says that he has reduced the company’s cross-border work as well as transportation of automotive parts in recent years. On the other hand, Challenger has almost tripled east-west traffic between central Canada and Alberta and British Columbia in the last 2 years. In Vancouver, the company has been doing a lot of drayage work and de-stuffing containers.

Having had to adapt to a changing market, Einwechter admits that the business environment, nowadays, does not look so promising. The company managed to replace $60 million worth of business over a 24-month period up to last year. Behind this success is a talented and hard-working staff.

Business has abated these days, and it seems like 2008 will see smaller business than usual for Challenger. However, Einwechter is still hiring drivers and is planning to buy 150 new Volvo tractors with I-Shift automated transmissions.

Challenger has always been known for its passion for new technologies. In this sense, Einwechter happily announces that the company is about to receive five new Peterbilt tractors equipped with new gadgets, including the new Paccar MX engine.

There is no doubt that the top awards Challenger has recently won is a living proof of its success as a trucking company with an entrepreneurial edge in a very wide-ranging enterprise.