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Getting Freight Quotes and managing freight shipping can be a complicated and time-consuming task for many businesses. Especially for small to medium-sized businesses that might not have the breadth of specialized staff to handle just freight management and logistical tasks.
That is why automating freight quotes, booking, and freight shipment tracking information with a wide variety of carriers is so important. Leveraging our newest Freight Management Software Technology can help your logistics team manage more freight shipping needs in a fraction of the time. So read on and we will drill into some of our top tips for making your freight shipping needs as easy, transparent, economical, and efficient as possible.
What are Freight Quotes
Freight Quotes are the cost associated with shipping heavier, larger commodities, generally over 150 pounds with commercial trucking companies. There are 100’s if not 1000’s of different trucking companies that can handle such shipments. However, they are each set up in different ways to specialize in certain geographic areas and in some cases certain commodity types. This can make their pricing for the same freight shipments drastically different, which is why is very important to shop multiple carriers if at all possible
Freight Quotes are generally based on the following information
- Freight Shipping Distance from origin to destination
- Total Weight of freight shipment
- Freight Class from 50-500 that generally helps organize shipping commodities by density, ease of handling, stow-ability, replacement costs, etc.
- Dimensions of pallets or master cases being shipped
- Insurance Requirements if above and beyond the carriers max internal insurance coverage
- Accessorials or additional handle requirements, like lift gate delivery, residential delivery, inside delivery, hazmat shipping, and myriad of other non-traditional needs and delivery locations.
What can Freight Shipping Be comprised of?
- Large products over 150lbs up to 45,000 lbs and a full 53 ft trucks max weight capacity
- 1-24 standard pallet position of truck space with standard pallet dimensions being generally 40x48x 70 inches or so depending on the type of loading door the truck has roll-up versus swing door.
- Generally, most heavy hard to handle freight items are palletized for easy lifting and transfer via forklift
- Most Freight is generally also shrink wrapped and banded to the pallet so that the cargo does not fall off or over on the pallet
What Types of Freight Shipping Modes are there?
There are many services level of freight shipments you can get freight quotes for. Obviously, depending on the service level, transit times required, and additional accessorials needed the quotes can vary greatly.
- Traditional Less than truckload freight shipping
- Expedited Freight Shipping
- Hazmat Freight Shipping
- Air Freight Shipments
- Shared Truckload LTL shipping: this is a new emerging service leveraging full truckload carriers to provide dedicated more economical service for LTL style freight shipments
- Volume freight shipments are larger than traditional LTL freight shipments of 12 linear ft of truck space with common LTL carriers.
- Partial Truckload shipments are larger than normal freight shipments that travel with truckload carriers billed by the amount of linear floor space occupied.
- Full Truckload Freight Quotes for the dedicated use of a full truck’s capacity
How you can automate the freight quoting process
Getting Freight quotes historically could have been a time-consuming tedious process. However, technology forward 3PL have created software like our latest GTZ ship. Allowing you to get freight rates from 100’s of carriers through one easy software. Our Freight Management software even allows you complete logistical transparency of each carrier’s, transit times, damage percentages, claims percentages, insurance coverage, and expedited freight shipping service levels
Additional Ways you can further automate your freight quotes process:
- Leverage an easy-to-use freight management software platform that shops 100’s of carriers best rates
- Import your carrier direct tariff into a similar Freight management system, so you can shop both your direct tariffs and a 3PL’s entire network of other carriers side by side
- Connect your freight carriers and rates to your E-commerce site for automatic rating and booking with new freight automation apps
- Connect your freight carriers and rates to your ERP business software so the loads automatically quote, book, and dispatch tracking information as order come into your ERP software.
Tips and Tricks to always secure the best freight rates
Obviously, no discussion on freight quotes would be complete without exploring how to get the most economical freight rates with a variety of carrier options. There are many ways push your overall freight shipping costs down without necessarily having to sacrifice quality service.
Top ways to achieve better freight rates slowly but surely:
- Leverage a large 3PL freight brokerage to shop 100’s of carriers side by side with their bulk buying power.
- Negotiate a class-reducing FAK to simplify our freight classifications for quoting and hopefully drive your overall freight pricing down.
- Try and consolidate shipments as you generally pay less per item/ pound the more you ship per load.
- Explore a shared truckload offering for more of your LTL shipping
- Leverage a 3PL warehouse and fulfillment center to ship from closer to your end clients. This will save time, money, and handling headaches
So there you have it, some of our best insight, tips, and tricks. To automate, simplify, further economize, and simply better manage your freight quotes needs. If you need help with any of these ideas. Or would like us to audit your current freight shipping or logistical process, my team and I would be happy to help. We have a great, friendly, and very thorough team now and it is very satisfying to help companies explore and better set up their logistical needs for any mode.
If you would like to have a short meeting anytime to discuss your freight quoting or other logistical or warehousing needs feel free to reach out to us. We would be happy to look at your process and even point you in the right direction if our services are not the best fit for your overall freight shipping needs.
Its my company, we are looking to grow, and we would be honored to look at partner with you more this year!
Sincerely,
Jeremy Curran
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