Digital Freight Solutions Eliminating Full Truckload Inefficiencies

With faster transit times and fewer damage risks, full truckload service is a great choice for many shippers nationwide. Yet even FTL has its inefficiencies—especially for shippers that may not actually have enough pallets to fill a truck even though their freight is over the weight limit for LTL. You’re forced to choose between two less than desirable options: A hefty shipping rate to buy out the entire space, or a lengthy wait until you have enough freight to fill the whole truck.

This article examines some challenges specific to full truckload service and outlines digital innovations that are changing the FTL landscape.

Common Inefficiencies in FTL

Compared to the LTL hub-and-spoke model, FTL offers clear advantages. Your shipment avoids terminals, traveling faster to its final destination and reducing its chances of damage or loss. And further, damage-sensitive freight can travel alone on its own truck, at a much higher rate if it doesn’t fill the entire vehicle.

And this brings us to a common problem that shippers often face: You may not always have enough pallets to fill an entire truck on a single shipment. Because shipping just a few pallets via FTL is often cost-prohibitive, many times shippers will wait until they have enough freight to fill the entire vehicle and therefore justify the price. Yet this method raises a number of inefficiencies, all of which impact your bottom line:

• Shipments that don’t move don’t bring in profits. The longer your items wait to head out the door, the less new inventory you’re bringing in to sell.
• Shipments waiting to fill up a full truck also take up warehouse space that additional products could be filling. This causes delays further down your supply chain, as new products can’t move onto your shelves.

However, recent innovations have proven successful at mitigating some (and sometimes all) of these pitfalls.

Digital Shipping Solutions for FTL

A number of players within the freight industry have created algorithmically focused logistics solutions aimed at reducing FTL inefficiencies.

Digital Freight Network—Convoy

Convoy specializes in building a digital shipping marketplace designed to democratize the relationship between carriers and shippers, connecting them in a fraction of the time at a percentage of the standard brokerage cost.

By implementing automation and machine learning, Convoy helps shippers access high-yield loads by digitally matching freight to carriers while simultaneously cutting down manual labor costs exponentially.

It’s important to note that even with these improvements to the process, shippers may still find themselves waiting to fill a truck until it becomes cost-efficient to do so.

Algorithmic Load Matching—Uber Freight

Uber Freight uses digital logistics solutions to reduce deadhead miles and keep trucks operating with active loads.

Uber Freight’s digital platform includes a load matching feature that uses automation to find loads that are closest to the previous delivery location, searching Uber Freight’s entire load catalog and schedule in seconds. Finding locations as close together as possible reduces the number of empty miles the carrier will drive in between.

Similar to Convoy’s solution, though, Uber Freight’s load matching helps… to a point. While its load-matching algorithm helps reduce empty miles driven between facilities, it doesn’t touch upon maximizing the freight carried within those trucks. Shippers looking to ship FTL, but without a full truck’s worth of freight, have no recourse but to either wait until they have enough pallets or pay exponentially more to ship a partially empty truck.

On-Demand Hubless Pooling—Flock Freight

Flock Freight focuses on eliminating empty FTL space by giving shippers a different—and more affordable—option for their shipments: FlockDirect.

Flock Freight’s guaranteed FlockDirect service optimizes not only where your driver is coming from and the route your shipment takes—like the models utilized by Convoy and Uber Freight—but actually optimizes the load itself.

Rather than holding freight until you have enough to fill a truck, FlockDirect allows you to ship your freight as it becomes ready at a fraction of the cost. Because your shipment is pooled with other businesses’ freight, you only pay for space your shipment needs. So if, for example, you have 18 pallets to ship, Flock Freight takes care of filling the space for the remaining 6 pallets, and you pay 30% less than you would have you filled the entire truck yourself.

Those savings are on top of the profits from items moving more quickly out of your warehouse and into the market. FlockDirect is also an ideal option even for damage-sensitive freight, with a damage rate of just .001%. FlockDirect is backed by a 100% on-time guarantee, so if your shipment is late for any reason, you’ll never be charged for your order.

Conclusion

Between load matching and hubless pooling, there are a number of different companies using technology to eliminate waste in the full truckload industry. Specifically, Uberfreight and Convoy are aiming to reduce deadhead miles and inefficient routes while Flock Freight is changing the makeup of full truckload shipments with hubless pooling.