Emerge Stronger: How Atlas is Continuing to Fuel Innovation throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 is rapidly changing the day-to-day realities of our nation’s transportation sector. While many states are issuing stay at home orders, fleet-based businesses have been deemed essential and are continuing to operate, while working to adapt to an everchanging landscape.

Throughout the past several weeks, Atlas has been quick to shift its strategy, seeking innovative ways to leverage our nationwide transportation fleet and dedicated driver team to support supply chains under duress.

With personal and fleet travel down considerably, Atlas shifted a portion of its capacity to hauling for essential businesses like Amazon, grocery distributors and more, delivering the critical products our communities need most. In fact, Atlas was one of Amazon’s most active carriers in April, according to their Load Board. By adopting this strategy, we’ve been able to provide alternative loads to our Driver team, keeping them at work, and on the road.

Transitioning into the month of May, we’re beginning to see stay home guidelines loosen and sectors like construction, outdoor landscaping and more start to re-engage. With “Do the Right Thing” as one of Atlas’ six core values and a fundamental part of who we are, it was important that we partner with customers to alleviate some of the challenges they’ll face in their return to work. We’ve been proactively altering our business model to make the transition back as seamless as possible.

As we emerge into a new world, Atlas staying nimble and creative in our approach, prioritizing digital transformation initiatives to keep our customers, partners and team members healthy and safe. We’re moving to a contactless delivery model, with Atlas’ self-service ecommerce platform as the hub for placing orders and accessing delivery information. We’ve already rolled out contactless delivery to our Michigan Tankwagon customers with great success!

Throughout the course of this pandemic, we’ve all been thrown many curveballs, but Atlas adapted quickly, shifting our priorities towards what really matters – our people and our customers. We fought hard to save jobs, developed creative programs to support our customers and leaned into digitization to improve our operations.

The way our industry operates moving forward may never be the same, but we view this as a chance to emerge stronger.