How To Pick A Load Board For Your Trucking Fleet
The road is the most common means of transporting freight. This is because it’s one of the oldest and most developed means of transportation. You can hire a truck or own a trucking fleet when transporting cargo by road.
It won’t always be in use if you decide to own a trucking fleet. Therefore, you should consider hiring other shippers. While word of mouth about your trucking fleet may work, it’s not enough. Especially since today, there are platforms that allow you to advertise your fleet to shippers. The platforms are known as load boards.
This article will discuss load boards and the steps you can follow to help pick the best truck load board.
- What Are Load Boards?
Shippers are the people or companies responsible for finding the means of transport for loads. Carriers are the people who take loads from one place to another. Load boards are, therefore, online platforms that are used to connect shippers with carriers.
It’s challenging at times, as a carrier, to find loads to transport frequently. This is because your truck services might not be well known, or there’s high competition in the market. However, with load boards, you can quickly get loads to transport. The load board you pick determines how often your trucking fleet will work.
If you’re looking to choose the best load board, consider the following steps;
- Conduct A Research On Various Load Boards
To begin with, you need to research the available load boards in the market. Since it’s a recent technology, there is an influx of load boards. This also increases the chances of landing on load boards of poor quality and threatens the safety of your truck fleet business.
That’s why it’s essential to collect information about the various type of load boards available and then compare them to help choose the best one. When researching the load boards, consider the following factors.
- Check How Many Load Are Available In A Load Board
After getting a list of load boards to pick from, you should consider checking how many loads are available in a load board. This is significant because it determines how often your trucking fleet will work. The more loads in a load board, the higher the chances your trucking fleet will be working. Therefore, you should consider picking a load board that often has many loads.
In addition to checking the number of loads in a load board, it’s essential to check the location of these loads. Some loads might require transport in areas that aren’t suitable or convenient for your trucking fleet. For instance, a load might need to be transported for a long distance which will incur costs more than what you gain for your services. Also, you might end up making a lesser profit than expected. Therefore, you should also pick load boards nearby or at convenient locations.
- Next, Check How Often A Load Board Updates Loads
Besides having many loads, a good load board should frequently update its loads. Frequent load updates are necessary because loads are quickly added and taken from the load boards. As a result, you must update your load board to confirm whether a load of interest is still available or has been taken. By ensuring this, you save yourself from selecting loads for your trucking fleet that have already been taken, requiring you to start looking for other loads.
- Choose Advanced Load Boards
Advanced load boards have an auto transport platform which reduces the hustle associated with other load boards that are outdated and manual. Advanced load boards have other advantages such as:
- They offer 24/7 access
Using load boards that aren’t advanced includes idle time as you have to wait for loads to be added to the board. However, with advanced load boards, you can book loads at any time convenient for your trucks. By doing so, you’ll control your workflow as you’ll know when your trucks are needed and when they aren’t working.
- They Give Load Suggestions
Advanced load boards use the routes you’ve used before to suggest loads that will use the same courses. This helps you save time and increase efficiency as you’ll be notified immediately of the available loads. In addition, truck owners are informed about these suggestions through mobile phones, which are easier to access than computers, especially if you’re on the road most of the time. Moreover, these notifications will help you fill your trucks faster.
- They Offer Tracking Options
Most people prefer knowing where their loads have reached. Therefore, if you’re using a load board that doesn’t have tracking options, you’ll constantly receive status calls from the loads’ owners. These calls can affect your peace of mind.
If you don’t want to experience such issues, it would be better if you picked an advanced load board. This is because advanced load boards allow the owners or receivers of the loads to track their cargo and be aware of their progress and location. Furthermore, advanced load boards avoid issues of misunderstanding and miscommunication between the parties involved as they offer transparency.
- They Remove The Need Of Paperwork
Transporting loads, such as expensive things like cars, requires a lot of documentation from the onset of the transporting process to when the loads are delivered. The documentation process using paper, pens, and fax machines could result in many problems. These problems can be human errors or misplacement of some documents that are necessary. Therefore, it’s better to use alternative options that might reduce the chances of having these problems.
Luckily, advanced loan boards have features that eliminate paperwork. Instead, you can upload all the required documents for easy access and save time.
Therefore, if you’re in a position to pick an advanced load board over another load board, kindly do so.
- Last But Not Least, Check Load Board Reviews
It’s essential to check the reviews of anything before you choose them. Load boards are no exemption from this process. Checking reviews of load boards helps reduce the chance of picking a load board that might not work well for you.
The reviews give you a chance to know if the load board you choose will meet your expectations or not. Also, from the reviews, you know what challenges to expect or advantages of choosing a specific load board.
Conclusion
If you want your trucking fleet to work more often, you must pick an effective load board. So choosing the right load board for your trucking fleet might be challenging as there are various factors you need to consider.
You might not understand everything required in this field, especially if it’s your first time owning a trucking fleet. However, you can use this article to understand some steps to take when picking a load board for your trucking fleet.
