This series of blogs, Smart Capacity Broker Tips, provides practical guidance for freight brokers and logistics companies on using Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity real-time carrier capacity and relationship management platform.
Time to read: five minutes.
When choosing the technology to use in your brokerage’s day-to-day operations, a solution’s ability to streamline manual tasks should be at the top of the list. Significant efficiency gains can be had when you automate daily activities such as making emails and phone calls to inquire about available freight loads, ETAs and the location of freight.
Reducing the manual tasks associated with each load ultimately can reduce the cost associated with covering each load, which is what every brokerage and 3PL wants to achieve — while building stronger relationships with shipper and carrier partners.
In this blog, you’ll learn how Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity real-time carrier capacity and relationship management platform can help you reduce your cost per load. Smart Capacity’s powerful features automate and streamline the traditional work processes for finding loads, tracking freight and more, ultimately reducing the costs associated with each load.
How This Is Useful:
Instead of using manual processes such as load boards, manual phone calls, and bulk emails, brokers who want to increase efficiency turn to Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity for finding and booking high-quality capacity. Brokers can use Smart Capacity to search quickly for capacity within preferred carrier networks by date, destination and truck type. Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity also includes a predictive load matching feature that optimizes how brokers/3PLs match with the best carrier for each load.
Booking reloads has never been easier with Smart Capacity. When you book a load with a preferred carrier in Smart Capacity, you can quickly search for a reload for the truck to both maximize profit for and build stronger relationships with your carrier partners. With the newly launched Book-It-Now tool, brokers can post loads in Smart Capacity that can be booked by carriers instantaneously through the driver app, with no additional communication needed between you and the carrier. With a Book It Now load, when the carrier accepts your posted Book It Now load, it’s automatically booked in your brokerage’s TMS and the carrier receives an automated email confirmation.
In our conversations with brokers and 3PLs, we often hear that their staff members make up to 10 calls to carriers or carrier dispatchers for every load that they broker. When you’re moving multiple loads in a single day, multiple check-calls become a major inhibitor to efficiency and reducing per load costs.
Brokers and 3PLs who use Smart Capacity in conjunction with our free mobile driver app routinely decrease the number of check-calls they make per load. In the case of leading 3PL Kingsgate Logistics, Smart Capacity and the driver app have reduced check-calls from six to 10 calls per load to one to two calls per load, representing a major efficiency gain. The reduction in Kingsgate’s check-calls is thanks to Trucker Tools’ GPS-enabled, app-based real-time load tracking solution. Kingsgate staff members can monitor the real-time progress of trucks from the moment they leave the shipper’s dock until freight is delivered to its final destination.
Trucker Tools’ load tracking feature is one of the 18 tools included in Trucker Tools’ free mobile driver app. Carrier adoption of Trucker Tools’ driver app, which includes the real-time load tracking tool, is typically much higher than other freight tracking technologies because of the app’s multi-functionality. Instead of using multiple apps to get information on traffic, fuel prices, weather, parking, truck washes, truck stops, and other essentials, carriers can a single app, the Trucker Tools’ driver app, as their go-to app. For carriers, it’s an added bonus that the app also includes a highly-accurate freight tracking tool that can be integrated with a broker’s TMS.
On Tuesday, Sept. 10, join Trucker Tools’ Founder/CEO Prasad Gollapalli and Kingsgate Logistics’ VP of Strategic Development Tom Curee as they discuss “Winning in a digital world: How rapidly employing the right technologies can make you the broker of choice with your carriers.” This webinar is being offered in partnership with FreightWaves.
Kingsgate Logistics is using Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity platform and mobile driver app to reduce check-calls, increase carrier visibility compliance to more than 90 percent, automate load booking and improve carrier relationships. To learn how you can do the same with Trucker Tools’ solutions, join our webinar on Sept. 10.
To learn more about the Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity platform, schedule your free demo.