Most of us love the Where’s Waldo? books, but let’s face it: Where’s Waldo? is not a great approach for your logistics business. If you’re having the Where’s Waldo? experience when it comes to load tracking or finding truck capacity, know that there’s a better way. Tracking loads and finding trucks doesn’t have to feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity real-time visibility platform and digital freight matching simplify these tasks and make them more efficient, saving you time and money!
The Challenges of Load Tracking and Finding Qualified Truck Capacity
It can be extraordinarily difficult to provide freight visibility to your shippers if you rely on check calls for load tracking. With check calls, it’s easy to lose visibility of freight if you can’t reach a carrier dispatcher or trucker to get a location update. If a carrier dispatcher or trucker doesn’t answer your call or text, you and your shipper are left wondering where that load is. Check calls also are incredibly time-consuming and prevent brokerage staff members from concentrating on revenue-generating activities such as carrier and shipper development.
Finding qualified truck capacity comes with its own challenges. If you’re like most brokers, you use a variety of methods to find trucks, from load boards and bulk emails to phone calls and text messages. There is one big problem with these manual approaches to finding truck capacity: they take a lot of time. You may have to field dozens of email and phone messages from carriers responding to a single load board post or email. It also takes time to qualify new carriers, so if you’re onboarding a new carrier for every load, that makes finding truck capacity even more time-intensive and expensive.
Why Your Current Approach to Load Tracking and Finding Capacity Isn’t Working
Many brokers focus on throwing more people at operational bottlenecks. If you want to improve your process for tracking freight, you may think that you have to hire new staff or assign more staff to handle load tracking. The problem with using more human resources for manual check calls is that it’s a very expensive approach. Any operational efficiency gained and any reduction in your cost per load is offset by the cost of hiring new staff members. Adding more staff members to make more check calls also doesn’t fundamentally improve your load tracking process. You’re still reliant on that carrier dispatcher or trucker answering their phone to know where the load is located.
Throwing more people, in this case carriers, into the mix also won’t necessarily improve how you find truck capacity. You cast a very wide net when you use load boards, emails and phone calls to find and book truck capacity. When you use these manual methods for finding and booking trucks, it’s difficult to book repeat business with carriers you’ve previously used. If you don’t book repeat loads with carriers, you have to onboard a new carrier every time you book a truck — and that’s a huge time sink that makes you incredibly inefficient and leads to diminishing results. Constantly adding new carriers to the mix ultimately doesn’t solve the inefficiency of manual capacity searches and booking.
Trucker Tools’ Value Proposition: See Load Tracking Updates, Truck Capacity in Real-Time
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), most businesses have about a 50 percent chance of surviving their first five years. The pressure is on you as a broker to ensure that you stay ahead of your competition. You must continually innovate and find ways to operate more efficiently to keep your cost per load low and your margins high. A haphazard, Where’s Waldo approach to visibility and securing truck capacity just doesn’t work. Instead of throwing more people at these tasks, gain greater visibility of loads and a better understanding of where qualified carriers are and where they’ll be in the future with Trucker Tools’ real-time solutions.
Trucker Tools’ visibility platform improves your business operations by giving you real-time freight location updates every five minutes, so you always know where your shippers’ loads are. You don’t have to call a carrier dispatcher or trucker to track a load. You can view the progress of trucks in real-time right from your computer. When a delay occurs, you can see it immediately in Trucker Tools’ visibility platform and react in real-time to address whatever is causing the delay — while providing your shippers with highly accurate, GPS-based location updates in real-time.
With Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform, you can see where truck capacity is available in real-time without using a load board, picking up your phone or sending an email. This gives you a major competitive edge because it lets you quickly and easily find truck capacity and book repeat loads with high-performing carriers. Instead of posting a new ad on a load board, sending multiple emails to carriers, or making seven or eight phone calls to cover a load, simply log into Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform and find qualified truck capacity in seconds. Our predictive capacity feature even lets you see where trucks will be in the future, which helps you find capacity in advance and book carrier reloads quickly.
Included in the Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform is our automated load booking tool, Book It Now®. With Book It Now’s customized carrier qualifications, you can allow specific carriers to book your loads in Trucker Tools’ free driver app — no phone calls necessary. When your preferred carriers book your load in Trucker Tools’ driver app, the truck and load are automatically booked in your transportation management system, making it a truly automated process. Automated load booking saves time and reduces the cost per load for both you and your carrier partners. Book It Now® also allows carriers to book loads at times that are convenient for them. They don’t have to wait for your office to open or for you to respond to their emails.
Read Four Reasons To Use Book It Now® for Brokers to learn more about our game-changing load booking automation tool. If you’re ready to ditch your Where’s Waldo, needle-in-a-haystack strategy of finding truck capacity and tracking loads, schedule a demo with the Trucker Tools’ sales team.
