Don't Let Inefficiency Eat Your Bottom Line:
8 Areas to Improve
Your Freight Brokerage
Harness Efficiency for Freight Brokerage Success
Elevate your freight brokerage’s resilience and efficiency with Tai Software. By refining eight crucial processes, you can slash workloads by 50% and empower your team for sustainable success and enhanced profitability.
Streamlining Success: A Deep Dive into Eight Critical Areas
- Receiving Orders from Clients
- Quoting Shipments
- Searching for Load Coverage
- Track and Trace
- Updating Clients
- Gathering Paperwork
- Carrier Bill Audit
- Invoicing
The Eight Areas of Improvement
There are eight individual touchpoints in the transportation process where bottlenecks and increased costs often occur. To thoroughly study each area, gather your team and work together to answer probing questions about the people performing each task, the tools used, and the resources needed. These questions help identify and research the cause of everyday issues. In addition, the answers to those questions can offer clues to improving performance.
Receiving Orders from Clients
Every load order represents dollars in the bank. Yet, many brokers don’t have a standard process for receiving and responding to orders.
Quoting Shipments
While your quotes should be accurate and competitive, your quoting process should also be efficient. Many customers may accept the first reasonable bid they receive, especially if they are in a time crunch.
Searching for Load Coverage
The areas of improvement in this part of your workflow hinge on two essential elements: the strength of your carrier network and your team’s use of load boards.
Track and
Trace Loads
If your customers wait to hear back from you on their loads or your carriers are bombarded by phone calls, emails, and texts from your team, neither partner will be happy. A good working partnership starts with an efficient and consistent tracking process.
Updating Clients
As you study the track and trace step, remember that your rep must relay the information to the customer. Your customers expect consistent, timely, and accurate updates.
Gathering Paperwork
Collecting the paperwork needed (invoices, POD, BOLs, and more) to bill a customer can be time-consuming and tedious. Yet, this crucial step is necessary for optimized cash flow.
Invoicing
There is often a 30-day difference in payment terms between shippers and carriers, leaving you limbo. The sooner your invoices are released, the faster that gap closes.
Carrier Bill Audit
The audit process can be full of inefficiencies. As vital as this process is, comparing every invoice to the corresponding quote can be tedious, and it’s time-consuming to follow up on any discrepancies. Any barriers to completing this step cause more delays in invoicing and payment. It will also hurt your company’s cash flow and relationships with trusted carriers.