Over the past few years, the trade press has published many articles urging closer shipper-carrier cooperation and showcasing the mutual benefits such cooperation can bring to both parties.

While solid progress has been made in many areas, including pricing, there are still some areas where carriers are not as cooperative as they could be. One of my pet peeves in this regard is that two major package carriers—UPS and FedEx Ground—continue to make it very difficult for their customers to find out in a timely manner what changes those carriers have made in their rules tariffs.

Filing tariffs with the federal government is no longer required of for-hire surface transportation companies operating in interstate commerce, as it was when the Interstate Commerce Commission was in existence. Nevertheless, individual carriers and carrier rate bureaus/classification committees continue to issue class-rate and rules tariffs and to furnish them to customers on request, as required by law. Some carriers, including UPS and FedEx, have gone even further and are making their tariffs available on their Web sites.

So far, so good. But both of those carriers' online tariffs have actually created problems for their customers.

Whenever UPS or FedEx amends or establishes any rule, there is absolutely no way a shipper can determine that a change has been made. No symbol indicating that the carriers have amended or added an item is applied to any rule. That means, for example, that anyone trying to find out what changes were made in the UPS Rules Tariff that took effect on July 12 has to read carefully through 30 pages of rules.

And to make things even more difficult, the day a reissued rules tariff appears on those carriers' Web sites, the tariff it replaces disappears. The old tariff isn't even archived. Thus, unless you'd previously printed out a copy of the old tariff, there's no way you could make a comparison. Shippers could go for days or even weeks before realizing they'd been hit with a penalty that might have been avoided had they received advance notice.

Fortunately, not all carriers, carrier rate bureaus, and classification committees do business in that manner. Take the widely used National Motor Freight Classification, for example. Published changes are prominently flagged with a symbol enabling the reader to see which items or rules are being changed or added. Plus, notice of changes is given at least 30 days in advance of their effective dates.

I do hope that in the interest of fairness and good business practice that both parcel carriers will take a hard look at making these shipper-friendly changes. They already give advance notice through press releases and prominent notices on their Web sites when a general rate increase is about to be implemented. Why not do the same for changes in their rules tariffs? Not only could that be accomplished in very short order and with a minimum of effort, but it also would go a long way toward improving relations with their shipper customers.