Number 1, working with a freight brokerage that has a lot of buying power and an easy-to-use freight management system that shops hundreds of carriers at their drastically reduced rates, all under one menu, like Travelocity for airline flights or things like that, just so you get a lot of options, because not all carriers can ship your commodity on their freight trucks as economically in each lane. So leveraging a lot of different carriers under one system can help you achieve better rates.
Ship more Units Per Shipment:
Obviously, shipping more units at a time per shipment. The more you ship at a time, the less it’s going to cost you per unit. If you can incentivize your dealers or whatever to buy in bulk, that will drastically reduce the cost per unit shipped.
Reduce the size and weight of your packaging:
Number 3, reducing the size and weight of your packaging, because a lot of this goes into density and the density of the actual packages that are shipping. So if they’re smaller and lighter, it’s going to reduce your overall shipping costs per unit shipped.
Negotiate a Customer Specific Freight Tariff:
Number 4, you can negotiate a customer-specific tariff with specific carriers. Certain carriers, if you’re just shipping from point A to point B all the time, there are certain carriers that probably specialize and are optimized for that type of shipment.
If you’re shipping all over the place, sometimes that’s hard to do. Some bigger carriers can accommodate that, but you can generally negotiate a customer-specific tariff. The magic number tends to be around $15,000 a month in freight spend for carriers to come to the table and things like that, but we can also plug these tariffs into a freight management system so you can shop them alongside a broker’s pricing with their carriers.
Reduce the Complexity of your shipping Requirement:
Number 5, reduce the complexity of the shipping requirement. Easier, you can make it the less accessorials, less lift gates, less inside delivery, less appointments necessary. That may be counter to what’s going on in the industry with residential delivery and e-commerce. But if you can reduce complexity, your freight shipping costs are going to go down.
Automate as much of the freight shipping process as possible:
Number 6, automate as much as possible. There’s so much software and so many automations now using API where you can automate the quoting, booking, tracking. Plug it into your website so it automatically quotes the freight shipping costs and lets your client pay for the product and the shipping. You can do this with ERP business software like NetSuite and SAP. Just the more you can automate, the less time, energy, and headcount you’re going to need to run this whole operation.