According to market research company IDC, inefficiency costs businesses 20 to 30 percent of their revenue each year. If you use manual tasks (i.e. check calls, manual truck searches, emails/phone calls to finalize truck bookings) in your business, you may be unnecessarily reducing your profits by up to 20 or 30 percent. Inefficiency within your operations also impacts your ability to respond quickly to changing shipper needs and to big swings in demand, like those we’ve seen over the last year. Inefficiencies in your freight broker or logistics business can be a morale-killer for the folks working in your business, as well.
Read on to find out how inefficiency is secretly hurting your business — and the steps that you can take to address it.
Why Manual Tasks Cost You More Than You Think
You may be asking yourself, “What’s so bad about check calls and load boards?” The biggest strike against manual tasks such as check calls and load boards is that these manual processes eat up your employees’ time. When tracking a load using check calls, you may have to call the driver and/or dispatcher seven or eight times or more to get updates on the load and where the truck is. The dispatcher/driver may not answer, which means you have to wait for them to call you back. In the meantime, you don’t really know where that load is and don’t have an accurate ETA.
It’s a similar situation when you use manual processes for finding trucks. If you’re posting your loads on load boards, you may have to pay a fee to post your loads and then you have to sit back and wait for carriers to respond to your post. It takes time to sift through the responses to your post, including those from unqualified carriers. Using email and phone calls to find capacity can be just as time-consuming because you have to wait for responses from carriers before you’re able to take any action on the load.
Another way in which inefficiency is secretly hurting your business is that it impacts your ability to increase volume and revenue. Inefficient operations make it harder for you to scale up your business because you can only grow by increasing your headcount. Giving your team members repetitive, mindless tasks also isn’t engaging work for your employees. Employees will be happier if they’re given the opportunity to do what technology can’t do — solve problems.
Reduce/Eliminate Check Calls with Trucker Tools’ Digital Load Tracking
Technology such as Trucker Tools’ digital freight tracking can reduce or eliminate check calls, providing you with a major efficiency boost. Trucker Tools’ freight tracking uses the GPS technology in the trucker’s smart phone and the Trucker Tools mobile app to provide you with digital location updates on the load every five to 15 minutes. GPS smart phone technology is accurate within a 16-foot radius under clear skies, which means the load tracking information you receive is highly accurate. Brokers and 3PLs of varying sizes are having great success with Trucker Tools’ freight tracking platform, with some reducing check calls by as much as 40 percent and increasing overall efficiency by 20 percent.
With Trucker Tools’ digital freight tracking platform, team members can instantly see where trucks are located in real-time simply by looking at their computer screens. When they spend less time on repetitive, manual check calls to drivers and dispatchers, your employees have more time available to do what humans do best: problem solve and provide great service. Digital freight tracking technology also allows you to better service your shippers because you always can supply them with an accurate ETA — and the same cannot be said when you use check calls to track loads.
Cover Loads Faster, Research New Lanes with Trucker Tools’ Digital Freight Matching
Digital freight matching replaces time-consuming manual capacity searches and load boards, increasing the efficiency with which you find and secure trucks. Instead of having your employees make a dozen phone calls or several load board posts to cover a single load, opt for Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching to save time. With Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform, your staff members can find in-network capacity with a few clicks of a mouse. You can increase efficiency even further with Book-It-Now®, which allows owner operators and carriers to book your loads digitally through Trucker Tools’ app or free carrier platform.
It’s also much easier to research new freight lanes and to find new, out-of-network capacity with Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching. Before committing to a load, new customer or new lane, you can quickly search Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform to see what capacity is currently available and where. The platform’s predictive load matching tool lets you see where trucks will be available in the future, which gives you an advantage over your competitors. Need to secure new capacity? No problem. You can search for out-of-network capacity in seconds within Trucker Tools’ digital freight matching platform, as well.
Read Trinity Logistics Finds Trucks Faster, Expands Capacity Options and Streamlines Load Booking Process with Trucker Tools’ Digital Freight Matching and Book It Now® to find out how one 3PL is increasing efficiency with Trucker Tools. Schedule a free demo of Trucker Tools’ real-time visibility platform, digital freight matching and Book-It-Now®.
