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In today’s logistics and transportation world, shippers rely on freight and logistics brokers and 3PLS, like you, to find carriers and move their products cost-effectively. However, the brokerage space is quite competitive, and customers have several choices. So, if you wish to stand out from others in your brokering business to gain and retain customers for the long term, you need to improve their operational efficiency and increase productivity.
So, how do you achieve this?
Automating the internal processes and making them cost-effective are two of the quickest ways to increase productivity, expand profit margins, and up the business volume without adding overheads. However, it requires more than just reducing operating costs to accomplish this. You also need technology-based solutions developed to streamline internal processes and main operational control affordably.
If you are interested in achieving the above, check out our 6 tips to maintain operational efficiency, increase productivity, and gain and retain customers.
1. Centralize Load, Carrier, and Customer Information at One Place
What dooms many brokers to fail is that they don’t use a centralized system to retrieve and provide information to shippers quickly. Shippers need to move loads and get their carriers booked as fast as possible. When shippers contact broker companies, they expect freight details within minutes. Brokers can win customers and boost internal operations by relying on technology to deliver crucial information. This includes searching load board, entering new loads, retrieving carrier, driver, and route details, viewing load history, tracking shipment status, and negotiating rates from a single screen.
2. Manage the Internal Operational Chaos through Automation
Regardless of your expertise and experience in the industry, it can be difficult to stay up to date with your internal processes when your day is spent answering calls, building new clients, and meeting with customers. Your brokerage business can become much simpler and more efficient when you invest in the right technology. Managed technologies that allow brokers to find the right carrier for load, enter new loads, manage active loads, submit load for approval, export payments and review reports from a single cloud-based portal can reduce internal operational discrepancies by 90%.
3. Eliminate Manual Data Entry and Re-Entry, and Reduce Errors
The fastest way to increase productivity and improve operations is by standardizing the monotonous and outdated tasks, such as entering new load, modifying existing loads on spreadsheets, & managing, sharing, and saving documents.
Make the most of your time by reducing paper trails through technology-based solutions like Load Logix Transportation Management System. Load Logix can interface with your system and allow order details to transfer automatically, help compare rates at the click of a button and submit load quotes instantly for approval or rejection, filter carrier rates automatically based on your preferences for easy matching, and organize and secure crucial information on the cloud.
4. Maintain Visibility of Operations at a Moment’s Notice
When you have hundreds of loads to cover and work with many kinds of freights, maintaining transparency in operations can be problematic and a bit time-consuming. For example, it is impossible to remember which carrier or shipper you have talked to already and which one you have missed. One more critical element is load tracking. Amidst so many things happening at the same time, you often miss a delayed shipment until your angry customer calls you.
When you don’t use an automated solution, you track shipments, approve or reject loads, manage accounts receivables and payables, and collaborate with stakeholders everything manually.
With TMS, you can access all of the above details at a moment’s notice. In addition, with GPS tracking, you will have the ability to trace carrier and driver and share updates to customers in real-time.
5. Eliminate Common Dispatcher Mistakes
Dispatching is the most important first step in the shipping process, which keeps truck drivers on the right track. With so many details to be included for different loads in the dispatching process, mistakes are bound to happen. Some of the common errors which dispatchers make include:
Freight dispatchers can make use of a comprehensive technical solution to save time. With the help of a robust system, they can find and secure optimal loads, optimize route performance by keeping track of drivers’ locations, and communicate with customers about load status based on real-time GPS data. They can also maintain paperless records in a secure cloud environment, which can be accessed on the fly, on any mobile device with an internet connection.
6. Understand Freight Market Trends and Changes
The trucking industry changes rapidly. In order to survive the major transformations, brokers and brokerage companies must change the heart of their strategies and give up manual processes and adopt the recent trends, including going digital.
Three 2022 Truckload Market Trends that Brokers Need to Know:
Brokers can mitigate these challenges by adopting a technology-based solution that offers comprehensive truck and load management support. The solution will help you filter and select the best carriers in terms of rates, commissions, and routes in real-time, based on freight requirements.
If you need an affordable, easy-to-configure, easy-to-use transportation management system that addresses all of the above points, contact our technical expert for a free TMS app demo.
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