Quetica, LLC

Quetica, a Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), is a specialized consultancy and solutions provider led by industry experts with deep expertise in Transportation Management, Supply Chain Design, Freight Network Planning, Data and Information Technology. We have a history of providing innovative products and services to a diverse mix of government agencies, shippers, carriers, solution and consulting partners. This breadth of experience across a diverse mix of clients, systems and processes provides Quetica with a unique knowledge base of freight data, which lies at the foundation of our transportation technology and planning practices.

For more than two decades, our highly skilled staff has worked with commercial shippers to design and optimize complex global supply chains, identify strategic locations for facilities, reduce overall supply chain costs and increase network resiliency. Today, Quetica helps public transportation and economic development agencies understand the highest priority freight investment needs across, public‐private freight transportation networks by applying cutting edge data, innovative modeling technologies, and data visualization and analytics tools. Our freight data network optimization modeling solutions employ the same techniques used by private sector companies to identify optimal locations for plants, distribution centers, and warehouses. However, instead of looking at a single supply chain, our models analyze the aggregated flows across all supply chains over the multimodal freight transportation network. Results identify network constraints and ROI metrics based on quantified benefits to shippers via lower transportation costs and to the public via reductions in crashes, emissions, and wear and tear on roadways should a capital investment be made to address a constraint.

Key to any decision-making process is quality data. Altitude enhances Quetica’s solutions by providing access to big data at scale to form detailed, actionable insights from real-world vehicle movement patterns that support our transportation planning, network optimization, and freight data analytics offerings. Quetica produces a comprehensive commodity flow data product called the Quetica Freight Intelligence Tracker (QFIT) and associated online data visualization and analytics tools. QFIT combines private sector shipping data with enhanced publicly available freight flow data to provide county-level analyses using traditional metrics related to the volume and value of freight moving into, out of, and within a region along with measures related to the equipment used and transportation costs paid by shippers to move the goods, materials, and products by various modes. Pairing results from the Origin/Destination (O/D) and Route Analytics modules of Altitude with QFIT county-level freight movements allows for network assignment using real-world truck paths. Integrating real-world shipment and truck movement data delivers a robust analysis of supply chains and freight fluidity for performance-based transportation planning.  

Quetica will continue to enhance and deliver innovative freight data, analytics, and optimization solutions that support planning agencies’ reporting requirements, policies, strategies, goals, and performance measures. Performance measurement plays a key role in understanding where and what type of investments could best improve the freight network. While private sector firms routinely measure their supply chain performance by tracking costs and reliability, public commodity flow data alone lacks important details needed to support a strategic, performance-based approach to freight planning. Freight fluidity, for example, refers to performance analytics (cost, reliability, speed, resilience) associated with supply chains and multimodal freight networks. 

The integration of private sector shipment and benchmark data like Altitude into QFIT bridges the historical data gap facing public agencies wanting to understand supply chain performance. Our data can inform policy and investment decisions through the creation of shipment, cost, and mobility indices that track performance over time; transportation spend estimates for key industries at the county and corridor level; economic and environmental impacts from freight activity; and analysis of impacts from extreme weather events and other network disruptions, among others. As freight data needs evolve, we do as well. The continuing integration of Quetica and Altitude tools and data present opportunities to drive further insights into freight fluidity, reliability and other performance measures across a variety of freight planning needs.