Time is everything in the transportation business. If you can reduce the time that you spend finding and securing capacity, you can reduce your brokerage’s cost per load, increase overall load volume and ultimately increase profitability for your business. Read on to learn how Trucker Tools’ Book-It-Now can help you reduce the variable cost of covering a load to practically zero.
Understanding the Variable Cost of a Load
There are two types of costs in your brokerage: fixed costs and variable costs. Fixed costs remain the same, no matter how much volume you move. Variable cost is the cost associated with the amount of product/service you produce, i.e. the amount of freight volume you move. Understanding the variable cost of a load for your brokerage makes you better equipped to recognize opportunities for increased operational efficiency, which can ultimately allow you to move more volume.
It’s likely that the amount of time you spend searching for quality capacity, negotiating rates and finalizing load bookings keeps your brokerage’s variable cost per load relatively high. Many of our broker and 3PL partners report that it can take up to two hours to find and secure capacity for a single load. For a single load, this is obviously a significant amount of time and attention from one or more staff members.
Book-It-Now Automates Load Booking To Reduce Your Cost Per Load
What if you could use a tool that cuts the time you spend on finding capacity and booking a load in half? Or what if that tool could reduce the time you spend on that load by 75%? If you could achieve those same cost savings with 15% or even 25% of your loads, you could reduce the variable cost per load and gain a significant edge over your competition.
That’s the value proposition of Trucker Tools’ Book-It-Now, a powerful tool included in our Smart Capacity real-time carrier capacity and relationship management platform that completely automates the load booking process. When you list loads in Smart Capacity as Book-It-Now loads, carriers from your preferred network can book the loads directly through our free driver app.
With Book-It-Now, you eliminate time-consuming methods for finding available capacity, including emails/phone calls to carriers or postings on load boards. The phone calls you’d normally use to confirm the load details with the carrier dispatcher/trucker also are eliminated. All the information the carrier needs is listed with the load. Once the carrier books the load with Book-It-Now, the load is automatically booked in your TMS and the carrier receives an email confirmation. As a result, the variable cost per load for Book It Now loads is close to zero.
Empower Carriers To Proactively Book Loads, Reduce Spend on Load Searches/Booking
We hear from our 3PL and broker partners all the time that they are often surprised by how Smart Capacity’s load matching and Book-It-Now tool are fundamentally changing how they do business. When carriers can access real-time information on available loads, they tend to take on responsibility for load matching and booking and to proactively book loads themselves. This reduces the time and attention that you, as the broker, have to spend on finding and procuring capacity.
Using Book-It-Now in your brokerage can also help make your carriers happy. In the last few years, we’ve heard again and again from small and mid-sized carriers that they prefer to auto book loads through an app instead of going through a long, manual negotiation process. If you’re a broker who is always trying to make a few more dollars through a lengthy negotiation process with carriers, you might consider a new approach. Aren’t you better off moving more freight more quickly than trying to squeeze as much as possible out of the carrier on every load? The time that it can take to try to make those extra dollars often doesn’t outweigh the cost. That time spent negotiating rates often can increase your variable cost per load.
In economics, variable costs usually increase as volume increases and variable costs usually go down as volume decreases. With Trucker Tools’ Book-It-Now, you can decrease the variable cost per load and increase your overall load volume as a result of the efficiency gained — all while improving relationships with your carriers.
To learn more about how Book-It-Now can benefit your brokerage, read “Trucker Tools’ Book-It-Now: A Game-Changer for Brokers and Carriers.” To schedule a demo of Trucker Tool’s Smart Capacity platform and Book-It-Now, email [email protected] or call 703-955-3560 today.
