In this blog series Trucker Tools Smart Solutions, we’re helping you solve some of the greatest challenges that you currently face in your brokerage or 3PL business. The biggest problem for most brokers and 3PLs at the moment is capacity: where to find it, how to get it before your competitors and where you’ll get more. The current challenge is that freight volume has continued to increase, while the numbers of trucks, trailers and drivers on the road haven’t, which has created extremely high demand for capacity. As FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller recently tweeted, “Fleets have added 42,000 new trucks for hire since the start of the year. Capacity up 2.6 percent. Volume up 13 percent.”
With the current capacity crunch in mind, this blog details how you can solve your capacity problems with digital freight matching and secure capacity faster. Digital freight matching also offers efficiency gains to you and your carrier partners, a benefit that positively impacts the volume of freight you can move, revenue and your ability to build a strong, loyal carrier network.
What Is Digital Freight Matching?
In the simplest of terms, digital freight matching puts loads that need trucks and trucks that need loads in one easy-to-access, digital place. Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform connects you as a broker or 3PL with the 1.3 million truckers and 165,000+ carriers who are already using Trucker Tools’ digital tools. With Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching, you can set up an automatic process where the capacity info you receive from carriers by email is automatically added to the platform, as well.
Digital Freight Matching: A Competitive Advantage When Capacity Is Tight
The value of having all of your loads and available capacity data in one place is high. With digital freight matching, you can quickly search for capacity to cover loads. You can search for capacity by trailer type, lanes, dates and other factors without ever picking up the phone to call a carrier and without using load boards. In fact, digital freight matching is the technology that is on its way to replacing load boards. The reason why is that you can cover loads faster with just a few mouse-clicks with digital freight matching, while using load boards can be a slow, laborious process. With load boards, it may take two hours or more to cover a single load.
With Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching, you also can easily research what capacity is available in specific lanes before committing to new shippers and new lanes. These lane insights help you make good business decisions when it comes to expanding your customer base or moving freight in new lanes. The predictive load matching capabilities of Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching let you see where trucks will be available in the future, which is a huge advantage in a competitive capacity market like the current one.
When you search for capacity within Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching marketplace, you can search for trucks within your customized carrier network. The ability to narrow your searches to specific, high-performing carriers can go a long way in helping you develop long-term relationships with preferred carriers. Finding backhauls for loads and booking repeat loads with a carrier or owner operator in a single conversation is much easier with digital freight matching, as well. When you’re finalizing appointment details with a dispatcher or owner operator, you can quickly search for reloads and future loads within the platform. You also can search for out of network truck options within Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform when you’re in need of additional capacity.
Digital Freight Matching Provides Efficiency Gains to You and Your Carriers
Digital freight matching helps internal teams cover loads faster, which provides your business with new opportunities to increase your freight volume. Let’s say, for example, that on average it takes your carrier sales team two hours of load board hunting and back and forth phone calls with a dispatcher or driver to locate and secure capacity for an individual load. If digital freight matching technology cuts that time in half, your carrier sales team has twice as much time to move more loads and service your shippers. In a tight labor market like the current one, you can use Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching to scale up your business without increasing the size of your team.
Using digital freight matching technology not only increases operational efficiency for brokers and 3PLs — it also offers efficiency gains to carriers and owner operators. With capacity as tight as it is currently, dispatchers and drivers are being inundated with inquiries from brokers, shippers and 3PLs who are looking for capacity. Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching technology allows you to view available capacity without making multiple phone calls or sending emails over and over to carriers and owner operators. Fewer phone calls and emails means carriers and owner operators can concentrate on other tasks and earn more money — which they’ll always appreciate.
To find out how Trucker Tools can automate your process for securing capacity, check out The Value of Book It Now®.
