In our “Dispatches from the Road” feature, the KANE blog will periodically publish interviews with our drivers – the men and women who live and breathe the transportation topics we often write about.  In our newest installment, we interview KANE driver John Shepherd, III.

Freight capacity has historically been viewed as a commodity. The onus has been on the trucking company to position itself as the customer’s “carrier of choice.”

But if you haven’t noticed, that’s changing. The combination of a growing U.S. economy and the chronic truck driver shortage is turning freight into more of a seller’s market, requiring shippers to examine how they can become “shippers of choice” for carriers, who are now more selective about the loads they haul.

On February 11, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) announced plans for a commercial vehicle ban on all major highways in Eastern Pennsylvania in anticipation of a predicted snow-ice mix the following day.   Thankfully, the severity of the storm fell short of predictions and roads remained safely drivable for the duration of the weather event.

But by the time DOT administrators caught up with Mother Nature’s exact plans, it was too late for trucking companies to avoid major financial losses related to pulling trucks off the road.

2018 was a tough year for both shippers and carriers as constrained capacity led to delayed shipments and higher freight prices. Q1 2019 has started like many Q1s have in years past, with a softening of the truck market. 

While things are shifting for the better, don’t be fooled.  The capacity crunch is not behind us. But this slight grace period does provide shippers a golden opportunity to build and strengthen relationships with a select group of strategic carriers.  Cementing these carrier relationships will ensure that you have reliable capacity at locked-in rates when the market inevitably shifts back.

I look forward to this week every year. It's National Truck Driver Appreciation week as designated by the ATA (American Trucking Associations).

All week long we have been celebrating one of our most important associate bases -- our fantastic drivers. Our drivers deliver more than 2 billion pounds of goods annually and never take a day off from demonstrating the values of the KANE Code.  

This week’s blog post was written by Jack Ampuja, president of Supply Chain Optimizers – a specialized consultancy that helps companies control supply chain costs through packaging optimization.

While dimensional weight pricing has been applied in domestic ground parcel since 2013, recently it has also migrated into the less than truckload sector; because dim weight pricing is based on shipment density, this makes efficient packaging more important than ever. In fact, effective packaging can actually drive freight costs down.

Here at KANE, we are big proponents of freight consolidation. So big that, when we thought of writing about possible barriers to consolidation in this week’s blog, we were worried that it might be too quick a read: “There are no barriers to working with freight consolidation services companies. Thank you for reading.” 

All kidding aside, we can think of a few companies for whom freight consolidation might not be a good fit. Read on to see if you’re one of them. 

When your product is ready to hit the road for delivery but your freight volume can’t justify the cost of a full truckload, what do you do? For many shippers, it comes down to choosing the lesser of two evils: ship via costly less-than-truckload (LTL) or wait to build a full truckload and risk missing retailer requested arrival dates (RAD). However, there is a third option: freight consolidation services (or “load consolidation services”) with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, where your load “shares the ride” with others like yours.